Reading Bret Victor’s “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” feels like a wake-up call. His critique of modern interfaces—what he calls “Pictures Under Glass”—is undeniable. We have taken the incredible dexterity of the human hand, capable of thousands of distinct movements, and reduced it to a single, numb motion: the swipe.
Victor argues that the future should be about “Dynamic Media”—screens that can physically morph, allowing us to feel buttons and textures. While I agree with his diagnosis of the problem (we are disconnected from the physical world), I disagree with his solution. I don’t think the future is a morphing screen.
In my opinion, Smart Glasses are the next big thing.
The End of the Swipe
Victor’s main gripe is that touchscreens blind our hands. We have to look at the screen to know where the buttons are because we can’t feel them.
Smart glasses solve this, but not by adding texture. They solve it by freeing our hands entirely. With the advanced hand-tracking and depth sensors we are seeing in emerging tech, the “swipe” becomes obsolete. Instead, we can return to the real-life gestures Victor mourns the loss of.
If I want to turn a dial, I can mime turning a dial in the air. If I want to grab an object, I just grab it. The interface isn’t trapped under a sheet of glass anymore; it is overlaid onto the real world. We can use our full range of motor skills to manipulate digital objects as if they were physical ones.
24/7 Access, Zero Friction
The other massive advantage of the Smart Glasses form factor is integration. Victor worries that interfaces are separating us from our environment. But if the interface is a pair of glasses that look like normal eyewear, the digital world becomes a seamless layer on top of the physical one.
We could have access to the digital world 24/7, completely unnoticeable to the people around us. No more looking down at a phone, hunching over, or disengaging from a conversation to check a notification. The technology recedes into the background, becoming a true extension of the senses rather than a “tool” you have to pick up and hold.
The Futility of Prediction
However, reading through Victor’s “Responses” page reminds me that we should be humble with our predictions.
Victor wrote his rant in 2011, convinced that the iPad was just a transitional phase like black-and-white photography. Yet, over a decade later, we are still swiping on glass.
When we look back at how people in the 1900s predicted the year 2000, they got almost everything wrong. They imagined flying firefighters and personal blimps, but they completely missed the internet, microchips, and AI. We tend to predict the future by exaggerating the present—Victor predicted better physical buttons because he liked physical tools. I am predicting smart glasses because I like visual overlays.
Ultimately, nobody knows what the “next big thing” actually is until it arrives. We can analyze and debate, but in the end, we just have to wait and see.