Interview by Adriana de Barros and Nuno Martins

• Jump to: Jordan Nielsen Weinman Mullenweg Finck Purgason Sodaplay WWFT

Eric Jordan:
I typically don’t like to speculate on this subject, but I believe holographic technologies will play a big part in the way products are rendered in 3D space on the Web. Right now the process of conveying 3 Dimensional objects on the web involves either a video-shoot or a 3D modeller to get involved. I like to think that in the future all studios will have access to inexpensive technology which allows us to scan everything from a pen to an automobile into 3D space and return a completely accurate representation of the object that we can utilize for presentation on the Web.

Jakob Nielsen:
The hardware trends are the safest to predict: bigger screens *and* smaller screens.

Because big monitors make users dramatically more productive, business professionals will be getting much bigger screens over the next ten years. I don't see this stopping until computer screens are the size of a broadsheet newspaper, which is about as big a space as humans can comfortably scan. The current debates about designing for 1024x786 are a temporary problem, since business users will get screens that are at least 3,000 pixels wide. Of course, we will need a different approach than scrolling pages to utilize this much space. Something more like newspaper layouts, is my prediction.

Simultaneously, smaller screens will also become more important as mobile Internet use finally takes off. I don't agree with those people who advocate having a single Web design that can scale across devices. I believe that mobile usability requires a special design that's optimized for the small screen and the mobile context. For example, articles should be much shorter and there should be a smaller selection of headlines in a mobile news service than for one intended to be used on a big display.

Software trends are harder to predict, but I do predict that we will not get artificial intelligence or natural language understanding any time soon. That is, not within the next twenty years. We will probably get more services that aggregate human judgments and decisions: Google is a great example, because that's how they derive their ratings of the relevance of different web pages. But the underlying judgments will still be made by humans because they are the only ones to actually understand the content.
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Lynda Weinman:
Apollo is new from Adobe. It’s a run-time that allows people to create desktop applications that are web enabled and run on different platforms such as Mac, Windows and LInux. WPF – Windows Presentation Foundation from Microsoft can be used to build rich visual experiences for Windows Vista. Soon, people will be going beyond web browsers and building apps that link to the internet and databases but don’t rely on the browser and browser standards. It’s going to be crazy cool – and work on all kinds of devices other than computers too.

Matt Mullenweg:
I think 3-6 years out we're going to see a lot more attention paid to vector graphics and visually scalable interfaces.

Nick Finck:
I think Mobile is going to become more widely adopted and this will impact how we think about the information we are dispensing on our web sites. I think accessibility concerns are going to finally make their way to the front burners, love it or hate it. I think that the lines between film, television, the web, and mobile are going to become even more blurry as technology moves a few steps closer to convergence.

Todd Purgason:
Intelligent filtering finding information your looking for is becoming a huge time consuming challenge. In the future operating systems need to know you and know how you work and think so that it can intelligently filter and find the content you most likely care about and disregarding the rest. I’m a bit shocked no one has figured this out yet. It is the only way to take down google do a google with a brain that gives you what you want and gets smarter every time you use it. Instead google is making content that people paid to show up the seemingly most relevant. But hey maybe somebody has done this and I’m not exposed yet.

Sodaplay:
I’m sure we won’t be short of shiny new technologies to play with—the more interesting questions is what will they be used for? As we look to the future the rise of the semantic web combined with machine intelligence could be both exciting and frightening.
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WeWorkForThem:
I think that people will have computers installed in their bodies with contacts that you can put in your eyes to see the information. You will be able to type with your fingers on regular objects and it will know what you are typing. We will become half human, half robot.