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What does the future hold for cellphones? We may not need to hold them at all. As phones shrink (and our hands stay the same size), features and novelty will play larger roles - in other words, they’ll get geekier, like the two-finger phone above.

Human-computer interaction is undergoing a revolution, entering a multimodal era that goes beyond, way beyond, the WIMP (Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers) paradigm. Now European researchers have developed a platform to speed up that revolution.

We have the technology. So why is our primary human-computer interface (HCI) based on the 35-year-old Windows-Icons-Menus-Pointers paradigm? Voice, gestures, touch, haptics, force feedback and many other sensors or effectors exist that promise to simplify and simultaneously enhance human interaction with computers, but we are still stuck with some 100 or so keys, a mouse and sore wrists.

The EU-funded OpenInterface (OI) project took as its starting point the many interaction devices currently available – touch screens, motion sensors, speech recognisers and many others – and sought to create an open source development framework capable of quickly and simply supporting the design and development of new user interfaces by mixing and matching different types of input device and modality.