When you go on vacation a home-management application will be able to turn down the heat, notify the post office to hold your mail and the newspaper carrier not to deliver the printed paper, cycle your indoor lighting so it appears you are home, and automatically pay routine bills.
You’ll watch “Gone With the Wind” with your own face and voice replacing that of Vivien Leigh or Clark Gable. Or see yourself walking down a runway at a fashion show wearing the latest Paris creations adjusted to fit your body or the one you wish you had.
Some people … find the idea of a humanized computer creepy. But I believe even they will come to like it, once they have tried it… Social interfaces may not be suitable for all users or all situations, but I think we’ll see lots of them in the future because they “humanize” computers.
Through the magic of software, information appliances connected to the highway will appear to learn from your interactions and will make suggestions to you. I call this “softer software.” Software allows hardware to perform a number of functions, but once the program is written, it stays the same. Softer software will appear to get smarter as you use it. It will learn about your requirements in pretty much the same way a human assistant does and, like a human assistant, will become more helpful as it learns around you and your work.
If you are using spatial navigation, the place you’re moving around in won’t have to be real. You’ll be able to set up imaginary places and return to them whenever you want … You will be able to play curator and gather images of your favorite artworks from around the world to “hang” in a gallery of your own … You will even be able to give friends tours, whether they are sitting next to you or watching from the other side of the world. “Here between the Raphael and the Modigliani,” you might say, “is a favorite finger painting I did when I was three years old.”
If you want to see reproductions of the artwork in a museum or gallery, you’ll be able to “walk” through a visual representation, navigating among the works much as if you were physically there. For details about a painting or sculpture, you would use a hyperlink. No crowds, no rush, and you could ask anything without worrying about seeming uninformed. You would bump into interesting things, just as you do in a real gallery. Navigating through a virtual gallery won’t be like walking through a real at gallery, but it will be a rewarding approximation.
Hyperlinks on the information highway will let you find answers to your questions when they occur to you and you’re interested. Let’s say you’re watching the news and you see someone you don’t recognize walking with the British prime minister. You want to know who she is. Using your television’s remote control, you will point at the person. That action will bring up a biography and a list of other news accounts in which she figured recently. Point at something on the list, and you will be able to read it or watch it, jumping any number of times from topic to topic and gathering video, audio, and text information from all over the world.
Spatial navigation, which is already being used in some software products, will let you go anywhere the information is by enabling you to interact with a visual model of a real or make-believe world. You can think of such a model as a map – an illustrated, three-dimensional table of contents. Spatial navigation will be particularly important for interacting with televisions and small, portable PCs, which are unlikely to have conventional keyboards. To do some banking, you might go to a drawing of a main street, then point, using a mouse of a remote control or even your finger, at the drawing of a bank … You’ll be able to jump into the map so you can navigate down a street of through the rooms of a building. You’ll be able to zoom in and out and pan around to different locations very easily.
You’ll also be able to set up “filters,” which are really just standing queries. Filters will work around the clock, watching for new information that matches an interest of yours, filtering out everything else.
One of the worries most often expressed about the highway concerns “information overload.” It is usually voiced by someone who imagines, rather aptly, that the fiber-optic cables of the information highway will be like enormous pipes spewing out large quantities of information. Information overload is not unique to the highway, and it needn’t be a problem. We already cope with astonishing amounts of information by relying on an extensive infrastructure that has evolved to help us be selective – everything from library catalogs to movie reviews to the Yellow Pages to recommendations from friends … The ideal navigation system will be powerful, expose seemingly limitless information, and yet remain very easy to use. Software will offer queries, filters, spatial navigation, hyperlinks, and agents as the primary selection techniques.