I agree with Victor’s point that the general  vision of future interactive technology is being limited to 2 dimensional interfaces, which leaves a lot of room for improvement. I was reading “Dawn of the new everything” by Jaron Lanier, in which he suggested that the future of virtual reality should include haptic responses which may be made possible through changing pressure in gloves, or even through the manipulation of a magnetic field so that it seems like one is physically experiencing resistance when interacting with a holographic object. Similar technologies could be used for non-VR machine interactions.

An interesting point that Victor raises is the debate around the value of speech commands. My first thought was to disagree with him, after we convey most of our ideas through words. Words can be incredibly powerful to make creative exchange happen or to build a story. However, the problem with using words is that it requires the other end, the recipient of the information, to have a similar background knowledge and some creativity in order to give meaning to those words. Therefore, it is very difficult to make a machine understand a concept in the same way humans do, which limits the capabilities of speech as a medium of interaction. For example, before impressionism was “invented”, it would have been incredibly difficult to describe Monet’s style of painting to someone else, let alone a machine interface. And as Victor argues, even now that we know what impressionism is, it is still too broad for one to say “draw a flower, make it impressionistic.” Maybe one day that will change, as artificial intelligence becomes better and more adapted to understanding human language.