The new hotness

Tomorrow's third-generation PC UI has already been invented. All the research is done. In fact, some elements have been independently developed by dozens of geniuses at multiple research centers, each taking a slightly different approach, but all embracing more than one of the major five elements of tomorrow's UI. Here are those elements:

1. Multi-touch

A lot of people now think Apple invented multi-touch -- the idea that a touch-screen can respond to two or more points of control at once. In fact, researchers have been developing multi-touch technologies for more than a decade.

Multi-touch on a PC user interface is as powerful as "multi-touch" in real life. Imagine if you had to go through life interacting with the world using just one fingertip. Dialing the phone would be OK, but picking up the receiver would be a problem. Multi-touch lets you "pick up" on-screen objects, turn them around, resize them and do other useful things. Here's what multi-touch looks like.