The concept of open world gesture interactions were so revolutionary at the time that the movie spawned multiple TED Talks, countless interface design articles, and even some real implementations, although reality definitely fell short of some people’s enthusiasm.

If anyone tells you they can predict the future they are either a fool or trying to sell you something. So I won’t tell you what I think the future will look like, but there is some amazing technology that is out today or right around the corner that is worth examining. The key to success with this new technology is not forcing content to fit a medium (ex: not every app needs to work on the Apple Watch), but rather to apply a new medium appropriately to the content by which it will enhance the interaction. Below are a few examples:

Pre-Touch Sensing for Mobile Interaction

Capturing intent is a strong direction that interaction is moving. If a device knows what you are about to do or want to do next, the interface can adapt to that new task.

Google Home

Voice technology has always held a special place in the hearts of futurists. Vocal communication is the primary way we output data to other humans, so it’s obvious we would want our technology to interact with us similarly.

Touchless Interface

With this interface you could interact with objects on a much more refined level than the broad sweeping orchestral like gestures of Minority Report. Micro interactions could increase efficiency and allow more natural gesture control with things like Google Glass or Intel’s Vaunt glasses.

3D Touch or Force Touch

A technology that has been widely available for a while is 3D Touch, but it has added another dimension (no pun intended) to the available interactions on a device.

Neural Lace

This one might be quite a ways out, but it would be so impactful to human society that it had to be mentioned. Essentially a neural lace would be something that would be wearable or even surgically implanted that would allow humans to more quickly export data to machines or to other humans. We as a species can only type so fast or speak so quickly, but if we could transport our thoughts as fast as they are happening we might potentially have whole conversations in seconds. This would even open doors to a better society if we could, quite literally, see things from the view of someone other than ourselves.

In terms of interactions, it is easy to imagine controlling a device simply with thought power, and this will definitely happen more quickly than full neural data transfer.