There is no way I could get along without a mouse in my job. But for many people’s jobs? Yeah, I can see that happening within 5 years.
The venerable mouse, created by Internet pioneer Doug Engelbart, has been unchallenged since the dawn of modern computing. But rapidly maturing touch and speech technologies are threatening to dethrone the mouse as the dominant computer input device.
Slideshow: Viva La Mouse!
Looking ahead five years, as the idea of a computer changes from a box under your desk to a device on your car dashboard, or on the bathroom mirror, or in your pocket, the mouse will become less important - maybe even a distant memory.
These new touch and talk technologies are already making an impact. For example, CNN uses a touch display to present information; Intel used one to showcase its new processors at the recent CES show. Ford uses speech recognition in its cars, and FedEx operates its phone lines with a computer voice — with a distinctive chime that most of us recognize immediately.
Apple’s iPhone sparked the touch-screen revolution. Since the iPhone debut, companies such as HP and Dell have decided to bring that easy finger control to the desktop. And companies such as Nuance and TellMe are taking advantage of improved computing power and better statistical models to make speech technologies more viable than ever before.
“The magic is in grasping the human objectives of an interface and combining the best technologies simultaneously to address those objectives,” says Don Richards, the creative director at Foghorn Creative, the company that designed the Intel touch wall at CES.
Of course, nobody is predicting that the mouse will totally disappear. Tests based on Fitt’s Law of human-computer interaction have proven that the mouse is the optimal pointing device. Engineers and programmers will continue to use them.
