Written in response to a request by the Editor-in-Chief of Computer Graphics World
In both my position at SGI and with SIGGRAPH, I have taken a lot of time to ponder what's next. The system defined by the human-computer interface designed to retrieve, process, and present data to user and to accept information back is still choked with bottlenecks. We will begin to break some of these bottlenecks over the next few years. Additionally, a new generation of users will come of age that will assume the availability of bandwidth and the effects that it will have.
I believe the new generation is key. It is difficult for me to think in terms of my generation. (I would consider myself a third or fourth generation computer scientist / graphics specialist.) In many respects, I am passe. Consider network bandwidth today. It is safe to say that increased bandwidth is having it's largest affect at home, particularly for gamers. While major corporations upgrade their networks and the Internet is being redesigned to handle even more bandwidth, the majority of technical users, including myself, have not changed fundamentally the way they work to take advantage of the connectivity. Nowhere is this more apparent than the oil & gas industry that I've been apart of for more than a decade, but in an aging industry, as established population begins to retire, a new computer-savvy, Internet-savvy user is taking their place, and new visualization systems that have been in the labs for years are starting to finally take hold. What next we will see are true remote collaborative environments creating virtual workrooms. These rooms will be driven by individuals who have become accustomed to remote collaborative Internet applications and for which the interaction will be natural.
Definition: Interactive Techniques - Technology that creates better, more seamless responsiveness of the human to the computer's presentation.
I have intentionally left out price/performance advances of current technology that would (and will) provide smoother and more realistic graphics.
The industry has done a very good job of exploiting the human visual system as a high bandwidth output device. The next step is to utilize other human systems as high bandwidth devices for both input and output. Sound and touch are both the next obvious areas to exploit, and we've begun that but we don't understand the interaction of those systems as well as we do the visual sense... but we will.
These new technologies will be required by the collaborative environments that are being built. Environments where the next generation user will be adept at data gloves and artificial spatial sound.
New display devices will allow us to have true unintrusive, pervasive mobile computing. These devices may be so flexible as to be woven into clothes. Combined with both increased network bandwidth and accessibility and improved human-machine interaction, we will see an explosion in the type and amount of data that we begin to process and more importantly understand.
I'm not sure if this is my hope or a logical conclusion, but I do not envision a VR world depicted in "Snow Crash". VR will certainly be a part of the world, but the real beauty will be an augmented reality where my connectivity and bandwidth will improve my understanding of the space that I physically exist in. It will not replace the space that I exist in.
Want a truly vision of the world that lives only in scifi land but for which the research is occurring today?
I do not believe that we will wear display devices like glasses. I think doing so is too encumbering for the masses. In my scifi future, I see computing systems that are at the same time totally intrusive and totally unencumbering. Taking my definition of interactive techniques to the extreme, computing systems that are connected directly to the high bandwidth human i/o systems both feeding and being fed information.
I do have an ongoing concern in all this. The computing industry, and even more so the graphics computing industry, today is caught in a downward spiral of creativity. We are caught in an environment that is being pushed to drive products faster and minimize the risk in doing so. The result is that we continue to turn the wheel one more time on the existing technology instead of stepping on to the next technology. This is why I intentionally left it out of my definition of improving interactive techniques. As an industry we need a renaissance of risk and exploration to achieve the next big thing.
This sort of discussion and debate is how to begin the renaissance.