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I took a class in rapid prototyping earlier this spring. One question has resonated with me since: “How does a human appear to the computer?”

There was a grotesque drawing of an eyeball attached to an ear along with a couple of fingers. It’s not entirely inaccurate: most of our interactions with computers are with our fingers, eyes, and ears. But now that microcontrollers like the Arduino and SBCs like the Raspberry Pi are so cheap and accessible, we can begin to look at different ways to interact with computers, through sensors instead of touchscreens and keyboards.

In a few decades, we may see a shift in our human-computer interfaces as lasting and profound as the leap from mainframe terminals to personal computers.