Future Interfaces Talks – Urho Konttori

​Imagine your car's windshield showing you contextual information deemed relevant by your digital Co-Driver assistant. Not in a different UI, but painted onto the road itself, in 3D, with no screen and nothing on your face. That's Urho Konttori's vision and what they are building enablers for at Distance Technologies. After co-founding Varjo's high-end VR headsets, he is now on a mission to blur the real and the virtual into a seamless experience.

​Distance's technology turns windshields, cockpit glass, and any transparent surface into a light-field display. No headset. No glasses. Just the world, augmented. It's currently in trials with automotive manufacturers and NATO defence partners, and the company recently unveiled a Field Operator HUD that gives armoured-vehicle crews something close to x-ray vision through their own hull.

​Another interesting question is what happens to interface design when the interface itself disappears into the world. When there's no rectangle to put things in, no app to open, no screen to look at, where does the UI go? And once AI agents start operating inside that always-on visual layer, who decides what you see, when, and why?

​Urho will share where this is heading and what it means for the rest of us, designers, engineers, students, and anyone who'll be living with these systems in five years.

​About Future Interfaces Talks

​Future Interfaces Talks is a talk series at Aalto for people building what comes next, and people who want to understand it. Each session features a creator working at the edge of new technology, sharing a specific technology or problem they're wrestling with right now. The format is a 20-minute talk followed by a 40-minute fireside chat and audience Q&A. You leave with a clearer picture of what the next few years will actually look like, and probably some new questions you didn't have before.