Look, touch and feel

How your mobile interface will morph in 2012

The mobile user interface is set for a range of changes in the next 12-24 months, creating new modes for users to interact with their devices, and with other devices nearby and network-based services. Touch will be improved through higher screen resolutions, brighter screens, the start of tactile feedback (haptics) when you press a button. Users will "recognize" onscreen objects and content faster and interact more accurately and faster.

These changes will make touch much more accurate for users, says Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile at Gartner. "The problem is that you sometimes touch 'in between' and greater accuracy can determine what you meant to press," he says. "Also, better algorithms would help you be sure you see the character you meant to press."

Touch today is mainly individual presses to buttons or areas on the screen, with some limited gestures, such as swiping a finger to scroll or pan the display. But gestures will expand, in two ways. In one change, touch-screen gestures will become a continuous movement of one or more fingers on the screen. Swype, a company acquired by Nuance, lets you press a finger to a keyboard and slide it from a one letter to another to spell words in a text message. A predictive algorithm figures out which letters to include and which to ignore.

A second type of gesture support eventually will make use of mobile device cameras to recognize and interpret a range of physical motions by the user. The basic technology appears in products like Microsoft Kinect, released a year ago as a $150 add-on for its Xbox gaming consoles: Users can flick through menus by waving their hands, for example. Microsoft now plans to introduce it for Windows PCs, and last year bought Canesta, which designs chips that work with a device's digital camera to let the device "see" in three dimensions.

Apple gave Siri a "personality," which "gives the interaction a softer, humorous feel," says Matt Revis, vice president of product marketing and management for Nuance's mobile group. The original Siri, later acquired by Apple, used the Nuance voice engine. Nuance also offers Dragon Go!, an iPhone app that enables Internet searching by voice.