Former Apple Engineer: The Future is Not 'Pictures Under Glass'

Former Apple engineer Bret Victor rants against Microsoft's Productivity Future Vision video declaring that the future is not 'Pictures Under Glass', in a lengthy blog post.

Victor, a former "human interface inventor" at Apple from 2007-2010, notes that there is something fundamentally wrong with a vision of the future that has us interacting with representations of real world items on touchscreens. He calls this 'Pictures Under Glass'.

Take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit. What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing? I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.


Instead of working towards a future of touchscreens, Victor says that our hands can feel and manipulate things so we should be aiming for a dynamic medium that we can see, feel, and manipulate.

We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and rotating objects in three dimensions, for picking up objects and placing them over, under, beside, and inside each other. No creature on earth has a dexterity that compares to ours. The next time you make a sandwich, pay attention to your hands. Seriously! Notice the myriad little tricks your fingers have for manipulating the ingredients and the utensils and all the other objects involved in this enterprise. Then compare your experience to sliding around Pictures Under Glass.

Victor concludes by asking the question: "With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?"

Read More [via BusinessInsider]