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We recently came across a lot of tweets and articles on the new trends in the User Interface domain. There is definitely a lot of exciting stuff going on. What’s eagerly awaited is to see actually how many of them will be a great epitome of “User Experience”, the parameter on which almost everything seems to be pitted against these days.

Smashing Magazine recently did an article on exploring the ten Futuristic UIs. A wonderful compilation with what’s possible. As also pointed out in the article, most of them seem futuristic, but a few of them are already existing and its only a matter of time when we actually experience them in first person.

Below is highlighted two videos of different User Experiences in the context of  User Interfaces.

The first is a project that Adaptive Path is working with Mozilla Labs on the possibility of a new browser called Aurora with different usage patterns than we already know.

Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo. Watch the other parts of the video here. Video Part 2, Video Part 3

Here’s another video on what was an imagination a few years ago, but has already been made possible. John Underkoffler, the person who designed and worked on the Gesture based Interactions, after interacting with the team from MIT,  for the movie Minority Report, shows us a live demo of the interactions in the TED talk below. Indeed what was just thought possible a few years ago, is indeed a reality now.

With more and more innovations happening around social media, our behavioral patterns, technology usage patterns, and technology becoming more seamlessly blend into our life-worlds, it is definitely exciting times ahead. However one of the questions that such successes and the one with Pranav Mistry’s Sixth Sense work, does prompt us to ask (and also asked by Chris; TED Curator at the end of John’s talk above) is when does the above technology actually get into the hands of the common man.

It is great that the interfaces are being successfully tested in the labs, but the question still remains on how, when and how cheap can the above innovations land up in the hand of the common user. Pranav had a great answer in making things more Open Source and letting more people explore and try their hands at it. Whether all the research labs will be doing that or not, is something to watch out for.