Claire Evans wrote an interesting article on scientist John Underkoffler's "spatial operating environment" g-speak for GOOD last week. Unlike current operating systems (Vista, Leopard, etc.) which are designed entirely around the mouse, g-speak responds to the organic human movement of the user, without a mouse. This could potentially have significant consequences for how we interface with computers, which is precisely why g-speak is so compelling. Excerpt below:

After all, computers -- with their processors, memory, graphics, and networked view of the world -- are offering us increasingly complex possibilities for translating and interacting with 1s and 0s. Yet, the way we use computers hasn’t changed appreciably since the 1980s: we still click around a screen with a mouse or track pad.

The makers of g-speak know that this sort of control doesn't take advantage of how the human brain works. According to Underkoffler, the brain regions that controls muscles, muscle memory, and proprioception (the sense of where your body is in space) and the visual system evolved to work together to deal with spatial situations. "That's why we’re all such experts at getting around and manipulating the real world," he says. "So it seems clear to us that computers should work the same way."