Inventing The Next Computer

Americans spend more than 10 hours every day staring at screens. But researchers are developing cutting-edge interfaces that could change the way we interact with digital media–interfaces that, in many cases, don’t require screens at all. Instead, your skin is the interface. Objects around you are the interface. Architecture itself is the interface.

The evolution–or devolution–of the interface was prominently on display this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (or ACM CHI, for short). The conference is a hub for the world’s top minds to share the latest breakthroughs in human-computer interaction. The papers and projects presented at ACM CHI tend to act like a barometer for what the future of computers might look like–and this year, it seemed to suggest that our computers will be increasingly embedded in the world around us.