Remember how you used to play outside with your friends when you were a kid?
You'd get dirty and get bumps and bruises as you ran around, raising hell and burning calories.
Today's children don't do that nearly as often, preferring instead to stay home and play the high-tech, ultra-realistic video games that were hardly in their nascent stages when we were that age.
But if you have a negative opinion of our modern fixation on technology and think the current couch potato philosophy is as bad as it can get in the 21st century, what I'm about to say will make you feel… well, worse.
Evidently, the joystick of today is destined to become the Big Wheel of tomorrow — in other words, it's about to become obsolete.
Yes, we've already seen the marvels of the gesture- and motion-interpreting technology available on video gaming systems like the Nintendo Wii.
But the next step will involve less motion, not more.
Much less, in fact.
Watch What You Think
As you read this, an interactive studio in London by the name of This Place is perfecting the first-ever commercial application for which the only user interface is the mind itself.
You read that right. No joystick. No mouse. It doesn't even bother tracking where your eyeball is pointing. This app, appropriately called MindRDR, needs no such primitive tools to translate your thoughts into action.
The app is specially designed for the Google Glass and promises to alleviate the need to touch the head-mounted apparatus in order to start and stop filming or take still shots.
MindRDR uses a biosensor manufactured by privately held, San Jose-based NeuroSky to measure electrical impulses from specific regions of the brain and turn them into actions your Google Glass can use.
Using the app, you can already take photos, capture video, and even share both without so much as moving a muscle — except for those required to point your head in the right direction.
The app, according to its designers, can currently read four varieties of thought patterns as they register in your brain. Ultimately, they hope to expand this functionality to translate up to 18 different patterns — allowing for far greater freedom of use.
Let's get real for a second here, though… This isn't so much a product as it is a technology demonstrator.
The Google Glass/NeuroSky biosensor combo is anything but elegant. It's clunky, uncomfortable, not practical to wear outside, and suffers from other issues such as overheating — but the point is it works.
The First Step Down a Long-Awaited Path
Eventually, once these two incredible technologies are combined and perfected as a unit, we'll see longer battery lives, far more capabilities, and most likely even more interaction with other devices like tablets, smartphones, and whatever else might benefit from synergy with Glass.
At Google, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and resident futurist Ray Kurzweil must be giddy to see their newest piece of merchandise break such important ground.
It means the wearable revolution, which they now may indeed be leading, has more than just comfort and novelty in store for consumers in the coming years.
It means, after almost half a century of personal computing, man and machine can finally communicate without communicating… They can effectively combine into a single unit, where thoughts and commands are one and the same.
Still think this is just a cool new toy? Well, it will be that for sure, but it will be much more than that, too.
This system's early successes have implications for everything from medicine (surgery by joystick is 
already fairly commonplace) to defense — where things like shaky hands and imprecise motions were once an unavoidable hazard.
Are parents going to get annoyed that their kids are not lifting a finger during their spare time?
More than likely, yes… But twenty years down the line, I would be shocked if this technology didn't have as profound an effect on our society as the joystick has had since the early days of the Atari 2600.
As mentioned before, two of the three entities whose products have combined into this new technology are private.
Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), however, is not… And with advancements like this becoming a major trait of the tech giant, their prospects for the future remain as strong as the creativity of the engineers who invent, use, and reinvent their products.