With their easy-to-use touch screens, Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch are driving home the idea that computing can be more than just tapping away at a keyboard and clicking a mouse.
So it's no surprise that multitouch displays (screens that are sensitive to the pressure of more than one finger) are capturing the imaginations of other manufacturers, including Samsung, Palm and Hewlett-Packard.
But multitouch is merely the first step of a coming revolution in the way people interact with computers.
That future may include using neurotransmitters to help translate thoughts into computing actions, face detection combined with eye tracking and speech recognition, and haptics technology that uses the sense of touch to communicate with the user.
"Computing of today is primarily designed for seated individuals doing office work in the developed world," says Scott Klemmer, co-director of the Human Computer Interaction Group at Stanford University. "If you flip any one of those bits -- look at mobile users, or users outside of the developed world or social computing instead of individual computing -- then the future is wide open."
Read more at Wired.
