The Emerging Interfaces Magazine
Brain-computer interfaces, gesture and eye tracking, haptics, and the next generation of how we talk to machines.
Xcott Craver's electronic anglo concertina replaces the air bellows with load cells measuring pressure on the wooden chassis sides, uses Cherry MX switches with custom keycaps on PCBs for the buttons, and runs on a Teensy 4.0. A concertina player's response — that the physical movement matters to the dynamics — is the most interesting design question it raises.
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.