I have a soft spot for new input peripherals—I think the area of developing new input devices for our computing lives is underexplored¹. They don't always become smashing successes (Apple's Touch Bar never was quite so well received), but I think it's worth exploring to see whether new types of input devices can add meaningful interactions to computers².

The Microsoft Surface Dial looks fantastic. It's a puck that can be twisted and pressed, either on-screen or on a table. This makes it useful in both touchscreen-tablet modes (such as the Surface Studio) or in regular mouse-and-keyboard desktop modes.

The dial allows you to navigate radial menus (another criminally underused UI element, except for, it seems, in 3D software?). Menus can …

As video calls become ubiquitous, new interactions are created. A video call creates a dynamic and temporary "shared space", a virtual room that comprises of not only the participant's screens, but also their physical environments. While many services allow the user to guard off other participants' access to their physical environment (replace or blur the background, filter out noise), sometimes the purpose of these calls is referring to the physical environment itself, and showing it to somebody who is not physically there.

ShowMe Assist is created for such a scenario. Example: ringing a handy family member to diagnose and fix a problem with your car. Here, traditional screen-to-screen solutions present some barriers. The video call …

The Mimu gloves are a musical input device. Through various continuous hand gestures the artist can control various musical effects, like high- or low-pass filters, panning, reverb, etc. Gestures can also be linked discrete controls, such as starting, stopping or dropping a recorded loop. On paper, it is a wearable MIDI controller, which instead of knobs and buttons uses bodily movement.

In practice, however, it enables something that's greater than the sum of its parts. It allows the artist, who might be singing a vocal part at the same time, to have detailed and accessible control over their sound. Instead of fiddling with an industrial controller filled with knobs and buttons, the Mimu gloves enable meaningful and expressive movement. …