In this reading, Bret Victor gives a problem that widely exists in the current visionary design for future interactions. He believes that all these visionary designs for the future have ignored the human capabilities and specifically omit millions of possible things our hands can do. The future interaction vision of the Picture Under Glass is, according to Bret, a retrograde of technology and interactions.
I think that Bret indeed makes a valid point in pointing out that future interaction designs do not make the use of the full potential capabilities of human bodies. And I can imagine that once we have the designs that enable us to interact with daily objects with our full capabilities, there will be so much more things that currently are not even imaginable becoming possible and accessible. However, as the question goes in the follow-up article, Bret does not provide a solution and he just can’t give a solution. Even when reading this article, I actually nodded in agreement with Bret’s argument, but I couldn’t personally imagine what the ideal world for Bret would be. Will we be interacting with physical objects then? But it’s obviously not a progress in terms of interactions and technology. But again, I am in line with Bret and truly look forward to the day when our fully capabilities could be achieved in interaction designs.
This article makes me think of a recent invention I saw online. It was like a physical embodiment of Siri. This physical virtual assistant can be interacted with different modes and is capable of dealing daily affairs for its users. This virtual assistant could be activated via voice control or tapping and is powered by AI. Will this be the future given the fact that it does make our life easier?
Link to this machine introduction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fQHAZWOUuY