In academia, advancements can sometimes be large leaps and very bold, depending on proof. Sometimes though, I think that the best improvements come in increments as they’re tested and spread out to everyone. Then someone gets an idea and it can be shook up again, become affordable and is taken up en mass.

I was looking at some old photographs, I forget where, of an office and it was full of rows upon rows of desks. Piles of paper stacked high and people sat at them with pen and ink, passing the paper around.

Move forward in time, the paper is reduced, typewriters take their place, calculators appear and the desk number is lessened.

Again another jump, fewer desks again and we have computer systems, still some paper (and a lot more post-it notes).

I wonder if anyone considers the next step on this? Perhaps the advancement of technology with video games entertainment can provide some insight, where the need to communicate with friends and team-mates regularly have produced interesting mixtures of text and voice based chat systems, with some video.

From what I have observed though, video chat takes a back-seat unless there is a real-world ‘meat space’ object that needs to be shown. If the item is something created in the ‘metaverse’ of the video game space then there is little to no requirement of actually seeing the person behind the virtual entity.

I had an idea. What if, instead of a monitor, keyboard and mouse, you used your body and voice, perhaps even your mind to make natural interactions with your surroundings which could then be anything from anywhere?

In fact, perhaps there could be entities which are not even really there. I thought that a combination of existing hardware could do this, there’s Microsoft Kinect, Vuzix Eyewear and the OCZ Neural Impuse Actuator.

As I’ve said before, with comments about the ‘meta verse’ and technology such as Google’s Project Glass. I think that some others are becoming aware of this kind of idea. Including Microsoft with their ‘Kinect Glasses’ leaked concept.

This is not so strange, people coming up with similar or the same ideas, at the same time. I think that it happened with the television and the telephone. Amusing that it could be happening with another method of communication, or at least, interaction.

Perhaps there’s a natural evolution to this?