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When Alexander Graham Bell introduced the telephone, he thought its
main function would be to pipe music to remote groups of people. And when
Michael Faraday spoke of the possibilities of electricity, the response
was frosty scepticism. Limited imagination is not a new phenomenon – and
now it dogs the information age. What are we going to do with all the information
that will soon be at our fingertips?

Some media conglomerates such as Time Warner in the US expect us to
plug into video-on-demand just as soon as they can provide it: dial up a
movie, then sit back and enjoy. Games companies such as Nintendo and Sega
are convinced that our top priority will be a fix of Mario, Sonic or Street
Fighter. And publishers such as Microsoft, Compton and Longman reckon they’ll
prick our consciences with promises of knowledge.

But this is today’s counterpart of Bell’s piped music. Gregory Riker,
director of advanced consumer technology at Microsoft in Seattle, insists
that the interesting applications haven’t been thought of yet. Researchers
have barely come to terms with the revolution, he says, but they are concerned
to ensure that whatever form the new gadgets take, they are as easy to
use as the telephone and the light bulb. It’s a tough job.

Computers with keyboards are today’s main information appliance. But
this will soon change, says Dick Lampman, director of Hewlett-Packard’s
computer research labora-tories in Palo Alto, California. The image of the
computer as an separate entity will fade, he says, as micro-processors are
embedded in every-thing from the fridge to the wallet, and networks enable
these devices to communicate with one another.

Others go further. Bill Atkinson conjures up a fairy-tale world of pocket
computers and special ‘helper’ programs, or ‘elves’ as he calls them – and
this is someone who studied neuroscience before falling for information
technology, first with Apple and now with General Magic, the company he
helped to set up in 1990 (see ‘Black hat, white rabbit’). Tell your elf
not to accept any more calls from Mr X, and the elf will reprogram your
phone to block his calls; tell it to let you know how your football team
is doing and it will search the databases and give you the latest score.
Your personal elves won’t interrupt you if you’re busy – Atkinson imagines
it will drop little electronic picture postcards from the network into
your Pocket communicator, the intelligent pager of the future which General
Magic is developing. You can read the elves’ messages whenever you’re in
the mood.

What really makes the idea of personal elves exciting is that they can
provide connections to any kind of device or service. Initially General
Magic sees the communicator as an interface to an electronic market-place.
In the longer term, however, the elf could bring you a message from the
refrigerator to let you know you’re low on milk and drop it into your communicator
(or make it pop up on your computer).

Of course, no one wants to come home and then have to control all their
intelligent households appliances with a keyboard, mouse and screen showing
a picture of a dial. The idea that one day we’ll have ‘Windows for Washing
Machines’ doesn’t inspire Virginia Howlett, director of visual interface
design at Microsoft, the company that gave the world the ubiquitous Windows
graphical interface. While its desktop metaphor, with overlapping bits of
paper (the ‘windows’ of the name), has its place, she believes that when
you want to start your washing machine by hand, the familiar dial will still
be there.

But other interfaces may change. For the TV channel selector, for example,
a putty-like ball that you could move in any direction and squeeze to select
the desired service may prove a more natural way of ‘tuning-in a station’.
And the push for video-on-demand and interactive shopping has got developers
thinking of the devices people will use to view films or buy the latest
vegetable slicer. Pavan Nigam is director of interactive media at Silicon
Graphics in Mountain View, California. He says that one of his department’s
maxims is that interactive TV must look and behave like a traditional TV,
not like a computer.

One option is to use something like today’s remote controls. But though
their familiarity is an advantage, today’s standards of usability are probably
not good enough – Nigam says that around 80 per cent of video recorders
in the US permanently flash ‘12.00’ because their owners haven’t figured
out how to change the time.

An electronic writing pad with a stylus could be the answer; certainly
Apple, with its Newton MessagePad, advocates this approach. If the MessagePad
displayed programme schedules you could use its stylus to select the ones
you wanted to see. Howlett goes further, however. On track to her putty-type
selector of the future, she sees viewers navigating the channels with a
space ball – a 3D mouse, which they would twiddle until they found what
they’d wanted and locked on to the service.

But could the hardware be dispensed with altogether? One person who
thinks so is Neil Gershenfeld, assistant professor of media arts and sciences
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab. He sees TVs of
the future being able to respond to gestures – a wave of the hand to scan
the channels and a grabbing motion to make a choice – and is looking at
how people can influence small electrical fields. As this technology develops,
says Gershenfeld, it will help to make electronic books easier to use. Readers
could move through the book by making the gesture of turning a page.

Much of this work, however, is still in its infancy. ‘We’re at the
beginning of the search for an interface holy grail,’ says Lampman. In
ten years’ time, the interfaces we use now will look as antiquated as the
cross between a candlestick and an ear trumpet which began the telephone
age.