Poking, pinching, and swiping at the air

As of 2018, smartphones have replaced standard mobile phones in much of the developed world. This means a large portion of the world is now familiar with the various tactile commands mentioned above. Through apps and games, smartphone users have learned a large variety of abstract skills to control the relative supercomputers sitting in their pockets.  It's these skills that will prepare consumers for the next wave of devices—devices that will allow us to more easily merge the digital world with our real-world environments. So let's take a look at some of the tools we'll use to navigate our future world.

Open-air gesture control as of 2018, we’re still in the micro-age of touch control. We still poke, pinch, and swipe our way through our mobile lives. But that touch control is slowly giving way to a form of open-air gesture control. For the gamers out there, your first interaction with this may have been playing overactive Nintendo Wii games or the Xbox Kinect games—both consoles use advanced motion-capture technology to match player movements with game avatars. 

Well, this tech isn't staying confined to video games and green screen filmmaking; it will soon enter the broader consumer electronics market. One striking example of what this might look like is a Google venture named Project Soli. Developers of this project use miniature radar to track the fine movements of your hand and fingers to simulate the poke, pinch, and swipe in open-air instead of against a screen. This is the kind of tech that will help make wearable easier to use, and thus more attractive to a wider audience.