With all the talk about Alexa nowadays, you’d think the future has arrived and we have our interface: voice.
But before you give up all your iPads for Echo Dots, take a moment to consider how much you use touch interfaces on a daily basis. While voice will no doubt play a huge role in the future of the smart home, touch continues to proliferate. Not only are car makers adding interactive touch screens, restaurants and pretty much everywhere else we go is getting better touch interfaces, while products in our kitchen like refrigerators are getting better and better touch interfaces.
And now, touch is combining with gesture recognition in a new science-fiction spin on interfaces that is gaining favor among product designers. The ‘projected interface’ – where an image is projected onto a flat surface to make what is essentially an interactive touch screen through the use of machine vision – is a new product interface concept that has captured the imagination interface designers in the kitchen over the past few years.
Projected Interface Demos Are Everywhere
Below are a few high profile projected interface product demos rolled out over the past few years:
Whirlpool, the world’s largest appliance maker, started talking about their interactive cooktop three years ago at CES 2014. You can see in the video how the Whirlpool smart cook top utilizes projected video as an interface.
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At this year’s CES, Bosch seemed to embrace the concept of the projected interface, incorporating it into not only a demo of its coffee making robot:
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Watch the video here.
And high-end German consumer electronics manufacturer Grundig has been showing off its VUX projection interface concept for the past year and a half:
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Source: Thespoon