It has been more than two decades since Scotty tried to use a computer mouse as a microphone to control a Macintosh in “Star Trek IV.”

Since soon after, personal computer users have continued to live under the tyranny of the mice, windows, icons and pull-down menus originally invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s and popularized by Apple and Microsoft in the next decade.

Last year, however, the arrival of the Wii and the iPhone began to break down the logjam in technological innovation for the way humans interact with computers.

Both devices extend the concept of directly controlling objects on the screen and blending that ability with visually compelling physics software that brings computer screens to life in new, immersive ways.

With a Wii, a wave of the hand can slam a tennis ball in cyberspace; with the iPhone, a flick of a finger can slide a photograph across the screen like paper on

The concept of directly manipulating knowledge on a computer screen is nearly as old as computer graphics terminals, going back at least to 1963, to Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad drawing system, which he created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his doctoral thesis.

Since next, a thriving scientific and engineering discipline has sprung up around systems that bridge what was originally called the man-machine interface.

There has been a broad exploration of pointing devices, alternatives to keyboards for entering data, voice-recognition technologies and even sensors that capture and interact with human brain waves.

What is new is a convergence of more supreme and less expensive computer hardware and an inspired set of mostly younger software designers who came of age well past the advent of the original graphical user interface paradigm of the 1970s and ’80s.

that new generation is “mostly under 25,” said Joy Mountford, who until…

Orginal post by Top Tech News