Next week I’m joining a really interesting conference that Sydney Skybetter has put together at Brown University. It’s a conference on the future of gestural interfaces.

But Sydney calls them, I think rightly, choreographic interfaces. Sydney’s a choreographer, not a sensor designer or any kind of engineer. He’s looking at a serious set of problems in human computer interaction around bodies, their movement, and associated issues of representation and data security, and he’s saying that expertise from the arts can help.

And the thing is, when I talk to technology folks dealing with how you’re supposed to indicate things to your watch or shake your phone or wave at your television (or, as Douglas Adams had it, try to sit very still so as not to accidentally give your stereo a command), they agree. Everyone knows there’s useful expertise here that can help industry move forward.

One of Sydney’s strengths is the ability to bring big, diverse groups of smart people together. That’s what we’re doing next week, and I’m looking forward to meeting artists and engineers and seeing how we can bring our artistic expertise to bear on the next generation of choreographic interfaces.

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