April Fool’s Prediction 2009

My blog has a long memory and therefore I’ll log a prediction for 2014. April Fool’s day is as good as New Year’s for that kind of thing in my book.

I believe that the web browser as “a rectangular window/frame/tab with some content in it” model, along with HTML, will be done in 2014.

 

I believe that four key, transformational things are underway in the UI space – supported by advances in hardware and distributed computing capacity and distributed storage capacity and network bandwidth - that will kill off the browser paradigm as we know it:

• There will be an easy and standard scripting model for real time manipulation / merging / transformation / editing / tagging / recognizing of video sources and the objects in them. Video will replace static pictures.
• Autostereoscopic screens will make it into mainstream gear like notebooks and even smartphones.
• Touch and proximity sensor based interaction will become the universal form-factor-crossing interaction model for mostly everything. 
• Graphic display surfaces will increasingly break out of the LCD-panel jail and we'll see use of interactive micro-projection/motion-recognition surfaces everywhere.

I believe that UI will be generated / mashed-up / overlaid / processed entirely and in a personally customizable fashion very close to the user and that any popular user experience shell will concurrently leverage data from at least two dozen different sources.

 

I believe that interactive local client apps / gadgets / widgets will become the prime battleground for user eyeballs and for advertising display real-estate.

 

I believe that full-duplex, high-bandwidth, peer-to-peer network communication will be the predominant model for social networking and for sharing data the any of us produces and owns.

 

Call me crazy.