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Original post by Oluseyi UI hardware innovations that have caught on have succeeded because they were designed to solve a specific problem - the mouse for indicating a point or region on a 2D plane, the keyboard for the entry of textual data. What problem, exactly, screams "gestures" as the logical solution?

Manipulation of 3D models, possibly? Buttons for rotating around various axes are rather clumsy. You might be able to reach into your onscreen tank model and move the third track bogey around by hand, or pose your orc warrior like a plasticine doll. But it's a fairly specialised application, admittedly.

Let's take a look at one dimension.

Information Technology.

This can either continue to accellerate, it could stop accellerating and continue growing at a relatively fixed rate, or it could stagnate.

Continue to Accellerate:
Singularity. AIs that are as many times smarter than unaugmented humans as humans are smarter than bacteria.

These AIs would run reality at a level we couldn't even understand.

Augmentation of human intelligence would be ridiculous -- each augmented "human" could easily experience every thought of every current human on earth at once without getting a headache. And the pure AIs would make augmented humans look like bacteria.

A significant portion of the mass of the planet and solar system would be used for computation.

Any current-human understandable plot would exist at a level below what the computers "care about". Technology availiable to the humans would be bounded by what the computers decide. The entire plot could exist within a "natural human preservation system" designed to keep human-level intelligences occupied.

Stop accellerating:
This is what most science-fiction future computers look like. After 100 years, our computers operate at 100 GHz -- they are roughly as smart as people, but can sort through data much faster.

AIs match humanity in intelligence, but don't exceed it. Things exist that humans are better at, and possibly AIs require significant resources to exist at human-level intelligence.

Ghost in the Shell, and most hard SF, looks like a world in which information technology stops accellerating.

Stagnate:
Technology runs into a barrier it doesn't overcome with info tech -- or maybe society violently decides to stop advancing in information tech. Computers mostly behave like todays computers. AIs are a pipe dream -- computers are at best expert systems (able to, say, diagnose desease). Star Trek has stagnated computer technology -- the ship's computer are not much better than todays computers, dispite centuries of time.

...

Alot also depends on how far in the future we are talking.

Be aware of both the industrial base costs of modern technology (modern microchip fabs require world-size customer bases to be economically viable) and the rate at which technology is accellerating.

It is probably easier to presume the "stagnate" or "stop accellerating" options for most technology, and pick out one or two areas of tech that "continue accellerating". This makes for an easier to understand world, and makes the "really advanced shit" stand out more.

Other areas of profound change that could hit us:
1> Energy storage. Really good batteries.
2> Energy production. Pocket fusion.
3> Manufacturing. Efficient and cheap manufacturing of goods. Nanotech etc.
4> Material Science. Nanotube weave and better.
5> Biogenetics. Superhumans, superviruses, supercures, superpets. Bioindustry.
6> Communication. Talk to anyone anywhere. Access any info before you need it.
7> Info tech. Really smart machines.
8> High-energy physics. Black holes, space warps, strange matter, "sideways" movement.
9> Space travel. Habitats, construction, resources. "High ground" has new meaning.
10> Military tech. Remote soldiers, autonomous weapons. Also doctors.
11> Personal transport. DumbAI flying transports.
12> Ecology. Cities that colocate with rainforests.
13> Social Patterns. Post-democratic. Post-corperate. Functional.
14> Economics. Incentives that work. Post-money.

In effect, read hard Sci-Fi. It is sometimes hard to find out what sci-fi is hard. :)

"Hard" SF is SF that is further from Fantasy. Star Wars is soft SF.