This Corning concept video caught our eye over the weekend. Have you seen it? (It has over 7 million YouTube views - not bad considering it's over 5 and half minutes long).

Corning's "A day made of glass... made possible by Corning" shows a day in the life of a family surrounded by smart glass interaction. It's visibly "the future" - and it's a future SLANT would love to see.

What caught our eye was the extent and connectivity of the graphic user interfaces within our most routine daily activities. Not only does everything look easy to use, but it just looks plain cool! And when your product is just a slab of (pretty awesome) glass, your customer's experience is going to be entirely defined by its user interface.

This is exactly what we meant in our GUI video when we said good GUI design isn't just a product feature - "in some cases [graphic user interfaces] are going to define products in a new way."

So what's the takeaway? If your product has to interact with people, make it easy and make it beautiful. Oh, and SLANT would love to help.

Update on 2011-03-15 19:35 by Lauren

There's been a lot of additional chatter about the Corning video this week. And it's up to almost 8.9 million views... smokin'!

This Fast Co. Design commentary, "The Promise and Perils of a World Filled with Touchscreens" talks about, yeah, how awesome all this could be, but then delves into the impracticalities of creating and interacting with an all touchscreen world.

Don't get me wrong: touchscreens are amazing, and Corning's glass technology will surely make them even more so. But when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

And there are other accounts of people not getting the warm fuzzies over this super-techno-fragilistic picture of the future.

Our point? As we mentioned on Fast Co's post, it's a concept video, not reality. It's brainfood, not doctrine. Let the Cornings of the world dream big and then let's figure out how to practically get there.