(…) three products generated the most passion in the gizmosphere: Nintendo’s Wii, Activision’s Guitar Hero series, and Apple’s iPhone. (We know, they were released earlier, but in 2008 they dominated the zeitgeist.) What do they have in common, besides creating happy shareholders and long lines at stores? They all integrate the digital world into the physical world in a straightforward way. In fact, you could argue that with devices like these, a sci-fi-like mashup of the real and artificial has quietly taken shape.

Speaking of Nintendo Wii:

Turns out you don’t need total immersion to interact naturally with a digital world: The games of Wii Sports allow you to perform the same actions you do in the athletics they simulate.

Speaking of the iPhone:

(…) iPhone’s multitouch interface shows the way to harness the Web’s annotations to our physical reality.

It reminds me of a discussion I had at Mitch Joel’s blog about tangible interfaces. At the time I wrote:

Machines are showing more empathy toward our physical nature, they are more complacent to our sense of nuance (approximation ?) and to our lack of logic.

I think technology wil not augment reality (…) it will augment our body, (our) senses and (our) mind. Like any tools do. Technology could be a halo of tools around our physical person.

Steven Levy is reaching the same conclusion when he writes:

We once talked about cyberspace as a distant cosmos, a digital outland that left the physical world behind. (…) This year, breakthroughs like the Wii, Guitar Hero, and the iPhone showed that 21st-century reality is a blend of the digital and physical, with a borderline so blurred it’s not really a line at all.

Read “Steven Levy on Melding the Digital and Physical Realms“