About Controllers

After CES, I had the lofty ambition of writing about some of the new and cool electronic gadgets that I saw. I never did get that blog post published. There were tons of large, flat panel displays. 3D was a big topic. And there were dozens of tablets.

One meta-theme I interested me was the ever-expanding range of controllers and input methods. In the past few years, we have gone from keyboards and mice to capacitative and resistive touch screens. The popularity of the iPad is proof that touch screens are fantastic for lightweight computing.

There are two other technologies on the horizon that show a lot of promise. First, gestural controllers hold a lot of promise. Like touchscreens, gestural controllers have been around for a long time for musical applications, most notably the Theremin. Xbox Kinect has been a huge success, and already companies and hackers are using the technology to do other things.

Another technology on the upswing is speech recognition and input. Both iOS and Android, the dominant operating systems for smartphones, have rushed to embrace this technology. If you haven’t already tried the Vlingo app for Android, you should. Availability of 3G and 4G data connections makes it easier to put remote processing capacity against the uploaded commands.

Voice control is most useful in a hands-free setting, such as driving a car. It also seems crazy to use body motions to control your computer. However, both of these new technologies are quickly being adapted for laptops and other electronics. Because each controller type has advantages and disadvantages, I believe that the future lies in mixing and matching the controllers. In the same way that a keyboard is paired with a mouse, I would not be surprised to see the touchscreen paired with voice control.