When you think of the user interface, what comes to mind? Graphics, design, flow, ease of use? More concretely, when you think about developing a UI things like CSS, Forms, Javascript, Xaml, etc. are the terms you hear.

But step back for a moment…what is UI? User Interface…how a user “hooks in” and uses some form of device. This device can be a car, a computer, heck even furniture. For the computer, the actual interface is a mouse, keyboard, and monitor.

In the future…there might be something like this.

Jeff Han is the creator of the multi-touch interface. Now the iPhone is going to use a weenie version of this tech (its supports 2 finger touch), but the future is (I believe) in this device.

For those who don’t want to watch the video (and there are many more out there), the multi-touch is basically a very sensitive touch screen that allows you to manipulate the device with all 10 fingers (or more). Furthermore, it responds to pressure and heat.

Here is another video of Mr. Han showing an 8 foot version of the touch screen that multiple people can use (the future whiteboard).

Why bring this up? This isn’t gizmodo after all. Here we talk about application UI right?

The multi-touch brings up a much larger question. How does the UI change if the keyboard and mouse go away? Imagine building the UI for an application that instead of a keyboard, mouse, and monitor it uses a 2 foot x 2 foot multi-touch screen.

How would you design your app? Because of its inherent zoom capabilities you will no longer be forced to adhere to a certain screen size. Instead of pointing and clicking, you have multi-touch, drag, and pressure points.

How does this affect your app’s flow and look and feel? How would you wrap your head around it? Most design techniques come from others (someone came up with the shiny “glassy” look that is so common now), but imagine if you were that person. A client comes to you and wants an app for the multi-touch. How would you do it?

I am getting a bit abstract, but when I ran across the newer videos of the touch screen it made me step back and think about how I would tackle such a challenge. Its a really interesting topic, and is one that we as designers and developers will need to tackle in the next few years when the keyboard goes the way of the Dodo.

That is the distant (5+ years) future of the UI. Tomorrow I will talk a bit about some of the 3D capabilities of the WPF and Silverlight which will be the future of UI in the next 12 - 18 months. Should be interesting.

For those of you interested here is yet another Jeff Han video.