According to this BBC News article, Gartner analyst Steve Prentice predicts the mouse will be dead within five years. He claims that multi-touch interfaces (such as those on some modern smartphones including the OpenMoko and the iPhone) and three-dimensional controllers will eventually take over from the mouse’s position as the de facto dimensional pointing device for modern computing system.
However, I’m a little sceptical, and there’s a simple reason for this: the problem of familiarity. Many people refuse to use new concepts simply because they’re unfamiliar with them. This is why the QWERTY keyboard layout persists to this day, despite the fact that some people find the Dvorak Simplified layout to be more efficient. It’s because people simply prefer the layout they’re familiar with. (With regards to this, I find the QWERTY layout to be more efficient, personally, because I find it’s easier to perch four fingers on ‘ASDF’ than to perch fingers and thumbs on ‘AOEUI’.)
The problem is that the computer environment is still largely 2D environment. We still only generally go left and right and up and down - this is largely due to the constraint of working on a 2D screen. Although touch displays are becoming more common, they generally lack an ability to perform a secondary or teritary click, and people may find it more ergonomic to use a mouse than to reach across their desk to touch their computer screen.
That said, 3D interfaces are becoming more common. Mac OS X’s Time Machine backup system has a beautiful 3D interface, and Windows Vista’s new task switcher, Flip 3D, also uses a 3D interface. Accellerometer mice are becoming more common (hardhack sites are overflowing with howtos) and this makes it quite possible that 3D mice could be common within the next decade or so. With this in mind, I think it’s quite likely that to use Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.12 “Snagglepuss” released in 2017, you could lift the mouse from the desk, hold it vertically parallel to the screen, and hurl it forwards or backwards to browse backups from the past.
