Three innovators in the realm of the user interface showed how thoughts and commands may one day be communicated more directly to computer systems. "The Future Is Closer Than You Think" was the wrap up general session for a four day conference of the annual VMware user group, VMworld, in San Francisco.

Pranav Mistry, inventor of the Sixth Sense camera and projector user interface, and Natan Linder, inventor of a robotic camera interface, LuminAR, both showed their wares coming out of the Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab. A third speaker, Tan Le, founder of the user interface firm, Emotiv, illustrated how brain waves can be captured to turn a thought into an action by the computer.

Mistry said the ability to extract information and knowledge from computers would be much easier if the end user didn't have to learn commands to enter into them or the keyboard and mouse actions that tell a computer what to do. Instead, he proposed that a camera and projector worn by the end user should be able to allow that user to project a desktop-like set of icons and screen onto any available surface, such as a desk or wall or coffee table. As the camera records hand actions that user takes upon the projected desktop, such as tapping a finger instead of clicking a mouse, the computer responds, opening the tapped icon or making the projected selection on the wall or tabletop.

Mistry illustrated some of the uses of such an interface when he projected a map of an airport that he said could be made interactive with the objects set upon it. If you set a coffee cup on it, the camera captures the image of the cup, the map application recognizes the digitized version of the image and responds by highlighting the Starbucks locations in the airport. There should be less separation between the physical world we inhabit and the information we want out of our computer systems, he said.

He likewise put colored markers on his fingertips and drew an image in a workspace projected onto a plain wall. The small camera he was wearing captured the movements and relayed them to the computer. On the computer screen appeared an image that mapped his fingers' movements in the color on each fingertip.

Mistry is a Ph.D. student at MIT and was trying to address the question, "Why can't we take the physical bits and pixels of the outside world and put them inside the computer?" as part of his research.