In this essay I will be describing the impact of potential future HCI developments. HCI has the potential to change our lives in the future as it has done in generations before us. Take the 'Smart Home' as an example, people can control their home via tablet or voice, this will become readily available in the future and will change lives, especially for disabled people, opening doors closing blinds etc. Driverless cars are also in the early stages of production and will change lives by being less dependable on human ability and reduce the amount of crashes on the road.
On the subject of disabled people, HCI has the scope to change their lives forever because it can allow them to control situations they wouldn't have been able to control otherwise. Voice control means that people with no limbs can operate a smart phone which unlocks doors by people creating new apps to help carry out day to day tasks. In the future it would be likely that all devices have voice control and will be used more than it is today.
Another form of control that doesn't involve touching a device is gesture control. Companies such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have already made breakthroughs with gesture control with their gaming products; the Wii, Kinect and PlayStation move. These devices allow users to control their consoles by moving their arms, Kinect in my opinion is the most advanced because the user doesn't have to have a controller in their hand. Smartphone manufacturers Apple and Samsung have created a way of unlocking devices by using the users face. This paired with voice control and touch screens had the potential to make the common controls, such as mice and keyboards, redundant.
With all these exciting developments in the pipeline, it may make users use their devices more, this presents health risks if the user over uses their device. Scientific research has shown that looking at a screen for too long can cause problems with sight or even brain damage. This has potential to damage a generation because they will grow up having been exposed to these threats and may reap the consequences. This being said, developers of these devices are doing what they can to reduce risk involving screen resolution.
Job losses are a problem with new technology being created. Not only robots in manufacturing but even machines in day to day life that wouldn't necessarily spring to mind when thinking about job losses. The majority of supermarkets today have areas where customers can serve them self called 'Self Checkouts'. Although they have flaws, easy to shoplift and more room for untrained human error, they do have scope to be developed and completely obliterate jobs for customer service assistants. Car factories are using robots that are more efficient and make less errors than workers which didn't happen not so long ago.
All these factors do have the ability to make our future economy more divided, the rich manufacturers getting richer and the poor workers losing jobs and getting poorer. However, with governments in power and the power of the populations voice, I don't see them bringing the poor to their knees.
