This past year many cords were cut. With prices going down, CPU power going up together with battery life, people now prefer mobility to an old-school desktop. For the first time, global notebook sales exceeded the ones of desktops. But, even these are now challenged by the netbooks and the smartphones.

The affordable PC was attempted in 1999 by Oracle but it didn’t succeed. Later the OLPC idea by Nicholas Negroponte, prompted a few companies to retry the concept but, this time, a portable one. Asus was the first one to deliver and started a revolution with its eeePC.

The smartphone has also been around for a while but with little success. In this case, it was Apple that started the revolution with the iPhone. It succeeded in creating an interesting device and getting developers’ attention, making available hundreds of applications at its AppStore. Something that Nokia failed to achieve with the Symbian operating system. Others are now trying to follow Apple’s footsteps, like Google with the Android and Palm with the Pre.

2008 was a very interesting and inspiring year but, what does the future reserve for us? Mike Elgan, from Computer World, predicts that “it’s the end of the whole desktop-or-mobile concept, and the beginning of everywhere and anywhere computing”. I agree with him and the technology needed is already available. The big question is how users will interact with these devices. Keyboards and mice are out of the question. It will be based on gestures, voice, multi-touch, and so forth. Displays will have to be placed in unexpected places.

The gesture-based interaction, multi-touch and thin TV trends at the latest CES are a sign that everything is “falling into place”.

And YDreams plans to surf the next big wave of innovation…

Antão Almada
Director, Strategic Software Development

Looks like companies are catching onto the idea that people really enjoy interacting with on-screen content and information through simple hand gestures or natural body movements, minus the hassle of mice, keyboards or complicated controllers.  It’s all the rage, and many companies are creating products that mimic the experience as recently witnessed at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

We’ve been creating natural interfaces for computing and entertainment experiences that work with gesture-based controls for some time now, only we call it Reality Computing – user interfaces that are natural, intuitive and instinctive. We pretty much made it our guiding principal.

We won’t say we set the trend, but we definitely realized things were headed this way early on in the game.

Video: Reality Computing in action, VIVO Campaign at Cirque du Soleil in Brazil