On the verge of a new User Interface

I can't help but feel we're on the verge of a revolution in user interfaces.

It's remarkable that the mouse, desktop and physical keyboard that emerged from PARC Xerox so many decades ago have survived as long as they have. But I'm starting to catch glimpses of something genuinely new.

It's a gestural, interpretive, and visually immersive experience that capitalizes on the semantic information made available by you and me. If you want to get a taste of it, just look at some of these technology demos (THEY'RE AMAZING):

Jeff Han's work on multi-touch-screen interaction

Blaise Aguera y Arcas' work on photosynth and seadragon (two techs recently bought by Microsoft's labs.live)

Then there's the new linux windows manager 'beryl' and compiz (this ain't your parent's desktop; in fact, it's clearly NOT a 'desktop' at all).

It all suggests something revolutionary; not the virtual reality that futurists were imagining in the 90s, but it's not unlike the immersive environment imagined by Gibson when he coined the term 'cyberspace.'

There's other tech out there, like organic LEDs and the deceptively mundane sounding ZFS filesystem, which will provide further support for this new vision (Apple's finally admitted it'll incorporate ZFS in OSX - eventually).

I don't know exactly what this all heralds . . . but I can tell you, it's going to be very, very, very cool . . . W2C4M.