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.

Microsoft’s 3D motion capture system for the Xbox 360, called Project Natal, continues to amaze and scare me with the potential it has to make your living room activities more interactive, and more public. Take for example, the post “In The Xbox Future, Your TV Will Know If You Are Yelling, Booing” over at Kotaku, wherein they highlight an angry sports fan interacting with a sporting event:

Imagine a sporting event — Natal could know which team you’re for because it sees your jersey, or knows you thought a bad call was made when you yell ‘boo.’ It learns about you and gets smarter to create a more tailored entertainment experience.

The sporting events/their broadcasters could theoretically partner with Microsoft and collect this sort of  information live, and display it during breaks in the event. For example, it could show the precent of Natal viewers who also thought that call was bad, or how many Natal viewers are cheering for the same team as you, and how many are cheering for the opposite team.

This kind of new interaction amazes me, but also scares me. I find it really eerie how close this situation is to a 1984-esque world, in which your TV watches you just as much as you watch it. Regardless, the technology is very exciting, and applications like this one will continue to catch my interest.

Let me know your thoughts on this kind of living room interaction in the comments!