I would be remiss if I didn't throw in an old fart reference to an retro game, so here goes. The original System Shock  had a series of areas on the screen where you would put your cursor and right click and hold to activate that motion. Middle of the screen for forward, bottom of the screen for back, top right for rotate right, bottom right for slide right, etc. Couple this with a tiny little slider at the top of the screen for looking up/down and standing in any of 3 heights and you had some serious control overload. It turns out they had a precursor to the wsad control scheme and hot keys for the up/down thing like the page up/page down scheme introduced in Quake which makes it distantly available to players today. Standing at full height to walk around, then having to crouch to hit the little robots with a wrench, or alternatively, walking around crouched and having to stand  to use the wrench on the security cams just turned out to be not that much fun.

I'm going to skip the PC controls, which by and large have remained pretty static almost since 1995 and have only gotten simpler over time in pace with simpler game mechanics. I'm going to jump to tablets and touch input, in keeping with the games I've playes on my 10" Asus tablet. I've played Temple Run with accelerometer support, where you tip the tablet in order to make a running character move left/right to avoid obstacles, and I have to say I don't think this is the right way. While the accelerometer is exceedingly accurate, it somehow feels wrong to be shaking a very expensive device around. I think those sorts of games would be better achieved with the motion sensing adaptors.

I have played a game or two with sound echo and reverb feedback based on touch controls. The effect seems to engage the sensory feedback loops of the body in a way that you don't get with a clicky mouse held at arms length. There's something about laying fingertips on the device that gets into the caress circuitry of the brain, or something.  I think this is very undeveloped, at least in the games I've tried. The tablet supports 10 points of contact, which admittidly could just turn into a confusing mess, but could also be used to create really cool stuff. With a little more haptic fidelity, you could do all sorts of things other than bringing up menu's or launching Angry Birds. 

How about a thought experiment to design the controls in the Engineering deck on a Star Trek-y type ship? At this point I would imagine the technology would be a combination of  touch screen and voice control. How would you build the touch screen displays to make the experience workable? You'd want the idea of confirmation boxes on most controls, but maybe that's done by touching the screen with both hands when you want to launch core, rather than trying to hit the 'ok' prompt when the gravitational anomoly is bouncing you all around.

That's why I like the idea of thinking about the Star Trek controls. You're led to believe there's some slick, slidy, gorgeously retro orange-yellow-brown control scheme. but never presented with concrete instances. I'd think button style interfaces are poor, depending on how frequently you'd expect to be thrown around, and potentially multi-touch the panel.

Looking around  a bit, it's clear that this question is a how would we make the controls now, for our idea of the future, and not how they'd do things in the future.  Looking at this site, which as a lot of images from TNG, it's clear how much our idea of slick UI has changed since 1993.

From this interview: ,http://en.memory-alpha.org/wik.....ms/Answers

This question/answer:

The original series had very tactile interfaces for the controls - utilizing levers, knobs, and buttons at each station on the ship. Later series and movies evolved into a more modern "touchscreen" sort of interface. Can you maintain that feel of the original series controls and still present those devices as "futuristic" now that our culture has taken great strides towards more modern touchscreen devices? Joshg

We had the weird challenge of having to take a 43 year old vision of the future and make it a current vision of the future. I wanted the movie to feel as tactile and tangible and as real as possible, but given what our computer interfaces are like now, its preposterous to assume that hundreds of years from now there won't be some version of holographic screens and things that seem almost ubiquitous now in science fiction. So I try to never let that kind of stuff be the star of the movie or overtake the story. We also had to deal with the fact that we started the movie in one ship and later in the film go over to the Enterprise, which needed to be the next generation of ship. I tried to make the first one more submarine-like, clunky, darker, metallic, and then have the Enterprise feel much more bright and shiny and brand spanking new.

It's funny thinking about Star Trek. If I recall my TNG correctly, the touchscreen consoles used a lot of sliders - two fingertips down, two across, that kind of thing. A starry precursor to multitouch. Though thinking about it now, I remember a fair amount of tapping as well - though almost no typing. I always pictured using their consoles as similar to the talked-about-but-I-don't-think-released gel touch interfaces, where a tactile level was added in the form of goo-filled bumps that can materialize at certain controls and give it a push feel. 

What amazes me most about UI design for games is how much of it is unpredictable, and how much would be so difficult to guess at and optimize. Changing the response delay between action and reaction by just a millisecond can make huge differences.

On average most controls are "good enough." You don't see much in realm of System Shock any more, where nobody had standardized controls so they did the best they could with what they were able to come up with. Techncially I'd say System Shock's controls were bad, but not in the sense of inept or clumsy. They just hadn't worked out a more elegant way to do it yet. These days, unfamiliarity or deviation from the norm are equated with being bad, but it's been a long time since I played a commercial game in which the controls were flat out bad, as in they didn't work or they were moronic. I've played lazy ones, though. As for exceptional... I remember thinking that The Last of Us did a great job with the nuances of how it handled the D-pad, though I'm damned if I can remember why. But arguably the rarest thing is to find a game for which the controls are so well-done that you actually notice it. "Fine" is the bog-standard.

The future will be weird. I can't think of better solutions than we have now, but then, I couldn't think why people would want e-Readers so don't look to me for prognostication. Wearables and voice seem fundamentally issue-laden. Movement seems tiring. Eye tracking has potential but that'll take some getting used to. The ones that read your thoughts just freak me out.

The main thing we can all agree (now) that Star Trek obviously got wrong? Grease. There'd be finger slime all over those big touchscreens, and you never saw anyone wiping them down.

The one Star Trek image I found on that site had tiny little arrows on the side of the display for scrolling through reams of text, which is really pretty silly in light of the notion of flinging, which, among other gestures, would be pretty  hard to imagine before touch screens were  invented.  Those large surfaces in movies like The Minority Report do look like they'd be tiring. A person would get carpal tunnel flinging images all day.

I like the notion of the holographic device interface though. You could have the physical interface stations near the equipment they were meant to manage, and a hologram of the lever, switch, button or handle that you would activate through a Kinect type motion sensor. No grease!  Plus, a positive visual feedback on the control activation state. 

I think that System Shock interface was along the spectrum between Doom/Doom2, which used the mouse scrolling directly to move without any notion of up/down or freeview, and Quake, which was the same with page up/page down idea to look up/down. I think. Memory fades. In retrospect, when I play Shock now, I can use the movement keys to go ahead/back in conjunction with the mouse to strafe at the same time, which gives a neat movement dynamic. You also could use the mouse to move forward at any speed from normal walk to ultra slow, which seemed to offer a real sense of stealth.