The Emerging Interfaces Magazine
Brain-computer interfaces, gesture and eye tracking, haptics, and the next generation of how we talk to machines.
Complex-Valued Quadratic Phase Gaussians (CVQPG), a SIGGRAPH Asia 2026 Technical Communication co-authored by UCL's Kaan Akşit, represents holograms as 2D Gaussians with learnable wavefront curvature. At equal parameter counts it beats prior Gaussian hologram methods by +0.19 dB (RGB) and +0.33 dB (grayscale), and it preserves more mid-to-high-frequency detail.
Home computers in the 1980s got the cheap SP0256 allophone chip and its strangled robot voice. DECtalk — the expensive, genuinely intelligible synthesizer later known as Stephen Hawking's voice — was never an option. Michael Wessel's Perfect Paul II puts a DECtalk emulator on an RP2040 behind an Apple II bus interface, addressable from BASIC.
Developer brenpoly's PolyMO is a physical virtual pet — an ESP32-S3 board with a 368×448 AMOLED face — that gets sick and eventually dies if you spend too long on your phone, tracked over Bluetooth with no cloud dependency at all. On-device language models (llama.cpp, Whisper, Piper) let it talk back and read notifications aloud instead of showing them to you.
Alun Morris built a fully offline Wikipedia browser for the Cheap Yellow Display, a nearly featureless ESP32-plus-touchscreen board, converting Kiwix's compressed Wikipedia archives into a format the microcontroller can browse without ever touching a network.
MIT engineers built a construction-equipment controller that replaces joysticks with a small mechanical arm operators manipulate by hand — translating direct, embodied gestures into excavator movements instead of making novices learn an abstract control mapping.
Vision Pro's input story has been eyes and hands. The seeMote Cube adds a third option — a physical object with buttons that click and haptics that confirm — and ships with open-source reference assets for developers.
A tiny solar-cell chip under the retina, plus glasses that project the world onto it in infrared. Science Corporation's PRIMA just won EU approval — one of the clearest signs yet that engineered vision is leaving the lab.
Most instruments make sound from strings, air, or circuits. A SIGGRAPH 2026 demo makes it from falling water — a MIDI-controlled rig that times droplet impacts so precisely it can play a melody in splashes.
VR headsets nailed sight and sound years ago; touch is the sense still missing. bHaptics' new TactGlove DK3, now shipping, puts 16 actuators on your hands to start closing that gap — aimed at developers and researchers.
The dura mater is the tough membrane between skull and brain, and cutting it has been a required step in every BCI implantation so far. Neuralink just skipped it.
Most BCI coverage is about what a person can do with an implant. BISC is a reminder that the implant's physical form factor — thin, wireless, high-channel-count — is its own frontier, separate from any specific application.
It's the same precision eye-tracking hardware already used for headset navigation, pointed at a problem that actually changes someone's daily independence.
'Neural input' sounds like a brain-computer interface. Most of what's shipping in 2026 is reading muscle signals at the wrist instead — a real distinction with real implications for what you can build.