MSNBC and Bill Buxton on making computers invisible

Last month I was happy to help host Wilson Rothman here at Microsoft as he was putting together a story around “making computers disappear” as part of his Future of Technology series. We sat in the front row of Microsoft’s Tech Ready event where technical folks from across the company get together for a week in Seattle to hear talks from the leaders of the company. The talk Wilson and I sat through was Bill Buxton who was as entertaining as ever – none more so than when he proclaimed that automatic doors at the grocery store are Kinect version 0.1 – motion sensing you see.

We then spent some time with Bill showing us a history of input devices, specifically his Casio watch collection, to prove out his theory of the Long Nose Of Innovation. The video above shows Wilson and Bill kayaking in Seattle (sadly I missed that part) and the one below shows some amazing touch screen interfaces that may surprise you.

My only comment is to note that we’re not looking to make computers disappear, more to make them invisible. A subtle yet important difference which I think Wilson would agree with. What we’re aiming to do is have technology fade in to the background in our lives to the the point that we don’t notice it’s there, but it’s still working away on our behalf, intelligent. Kinect is an example of how we can remove the barriers and in making the controller invisible, we’re seeing that technology become less of a barrier. I saw this first hand this weekend when a group of group of businessmen who are not exactly hard core gamers leapt up to use Kinect as they no longer had to embarrass themselves with a controller they couldn’t (literally) get to grips with.

…oh and props to MSNBC for a very cool feature in their video content that allows you to create your own clips…neat!