Tonight was first of the two uxWaterloo events scheduled for November.

It was a very interesting talk – which I may get into in more detail in another blog post – but my interest was piqued on another topic before our guest speaker even took the stage. While waiting for everyone to take their seats I was socializing with a few of the other attendees. In advance, if either of the two ladies I was speaking to tonight end up reading this – I’m very sorry I forgot your names!

During some light conversation about our interests in user experience related fields – one of these ladies (we’ll call her Alice) wanted to add the other (we’ll call her Brenda) to LinkedIn. Alice asked Brenda if she was on LinkedIn, and after Brenda said yes, Alice proceeded to pull out her BlackBerry to look Brenda up.

It was at this point that I asked them “won’t it be interesting when your phone will have opened up LinkedIn and already searched for Brenda because it heard our conversation?”. We all kind of laughed, and commented on how that technology was not quite ready for that yet with big smiles. Phones reacting to your conversations? Sorcery I say!

However ridiculous this concept sounds, we might not be that far off.

Technologies such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect have (as I’ve heard) very intelligent voice detection – to the point where it knows the difference between the voices of the users in the room. It’s not a stretch to imagine Microsoft putting similar technology into their newly launched Windows Phone 7 to enable this very sort of thing. It would be a very interesting shift in user experience design for applications to know what you want to do before you’ve decided to do it.

Apparently GM has been busy, working on early versions of a system that will turn windshields into heads-up displays. I think it was about two years ago when I first saw commercials for cars that projected your speed onto the windshield. Immediately my imagination went crazy – I thought it was the beginning of those really cool heads-up displays that you see on vehicles in science fiction.

I started thinking of what else you could do with that sort of technology. The first thing that came to mind was to move information from the dashboard to the windshield: your speed, gas tank’s gauge and whatever else you might fancy.

Now of course, there are dangers to having things displayed on the windshield. The big concern is that they may get in the way of seeing what’s on the road. Having them more prominently displayed might also cause drivers to look at them more often, causing a distraction. Both of those problems can be resolved by having some sort button on the steering wheel that toggles the display.

GM’s examples are even cooler than my initial ideas though: they have the system highlight the edge of the road in foggy conditions and pick out signs along the way and bring them to your attention with an outline. It seems that the system only highlights one thing at a time right now, but it’s not much of a stretch to imagine they’ll be able to do something like full road highlighting to make driving at night easier.

GM's HUD showing the edge of the road in fog