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TAT, also known by its longer name "The Astonishing Tribe," is a mobile design and development firm best known among consumers for its forthcoming augmented reality application known as "Recognizr." The app (see previous coverage) is able to "see" a person's face though a smartphone's camera and then use facial recognition algorithms to identify them and serve up related information like recent status updates, Tweets and a LinkedIn bio, for example.

Unfortunately, we have some bad news about that ground-breaking app: it's been killed. However, we have other exciting news that may lessen the blow.

The Kinect has gone on sale today. Microsoft's new touchless, full body (plus facial expressions), gesture-based interface for the XBox360 gaming system is going to make a big splash in the contemporary consumer market- but how far could it be extended as an interface for the technology of the future?

Could Kinect, or something like it, someday be the way we flick a phone call from our mobile device to our smart TV? Could it be the way we gesture in the air to switch views on our home monitor from room to room? Could it be the way we dial our web-connected home appliances up and down, based on recommendations provided by online services that are watching local energy prices fluctuate? In the following article, we'll consider the perspectives of three of the world's top technology analysts, all with very different perspectives on the future of Kinect beyond the Xbox.

The mobile augmented reality (AR) industry has seen a tremendous amount of growth over the last year. No longer are we simply holding our phones up looking around for nearby coffee shops - now our magical pocket computers can recognize images and augment them in real-time with 3D graphics. Mobile AR browsers like junaio and Layar have begun to venture into this realm, but a new player, Popcode, has a different spin on the mobile AR interface and how we interact with objects in the real world.

Dale Herigstad, Chief Creative Officer at design firm Schematic, spoke today at the XML Auckland conference. Herigstad worked with Steven Spielberg on the conceptual design for the film Minority Report, including designing the hologram screens on which Tom Cruise used his hands to navigate.

The subject of Herigstad's presentation today was new forms of User Interfaces for Web, TV and other media. Examples of the interfaces he discussed were touch screen and "distance gestures" - the latter being what Cruise was doing in Minority Report. Herigstad showed some real world examples of distance gestures, mostly from the TV/movie industry.

People who in the next few years solve big problems in Information Overload are going to be very important, and some of them are going to be UI and UX (user experience) designers.

German ISP T-Online demonstrated a big multi-touch screen right out of Minority Report at the CeBIT conference in Hannover this week (see this and other videos below). Many other designers are working on variations on that theme. Other designers still are aiming to bring game-like interfaces to other data-centric experiences. What would you like to see in interface design?