We're living in interesting times. Tech firms want to take over our TVs, our phones are more powerful than some recent PCs, and we can control games consoles through the medium of dance. New interfaces are all around us, from touch screens to augmented reality, and the way we interact with technology is being transformed. But which interfaces are genuine leaps forward and which are digital dead ends? What makes a good user interface anyway? Videos of very young children playing with iPads have become an internet cliché, but they demonstrate how intuitive technology is becoming: nobody was filming two-year-olds using IBM's original PC. The IBM PC's command line interface was streets ahead of 1970s computers' switches, of course, but it wasn't until the arrival of the graphical user interfaces of the 1980s and beyond that personal computing became simple enough for the mainstream. And now the landscape is changing again. After more than two decades of dominance, WIMP interfaces - windows, icons, menus and pointing devices - face new challengers in the form of multi-touch devices, voice control, gesture input and augmented reality. This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas showed where we're heading.
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