I believe we will see a real shift in web UI in the coming five years as desktop and web eventually converge. The four competing technologies will be Adobe Flash/Flex/Air, MS WPF/SilverLight, Apple Core Animation/QuickTime and whatever open standards Google comes up with within the next couple of years. All of these technologies will evolve along similar paths, but I will focus on Apple.

QuickTime will use an Apple OSX technology called Core Animation which allows developers to create full blown particle based animations within their applications and other media. What would normally take a team of highly seasoned developers a week to create could be done by one developer in an afternoon. First, the produced animations are not post-production video, but rather real-time renderings. Second, they are fully user-interactive. Third, they have real 3D physics and particle rendering built in. And fourth, they can be sequenced from small instruction sets requiring much less bandwidth than a fully rendered and streamed sequence would require.

This means that operating systems can be animated in 3D with whatever optimal interface you can conceive of (Time-Machine was built with Core Animation). it means that desktop applications can be fully animated in 3D, providing functionality that wasn’t previously possible. And in the future, it means that websites, internet entertainment, internet ads, and internet applications can be streamed and rendered to our desktops in full real-time 3D animation at a reasonable bandwidth. The future implications of this are far reaching and could drastically change the competitive dynamics between Adobe, Microsoft, Apple and Google as rich internet applications become the norm.

Finally, being that we’re talking real-time rendered 3D animation, this means it would then be possible to implement VR interfaces using stereographic headsets and/or monitors. And at higher bandwidths, fully immersive and interactive VR movies could be streamed into our homes, cars, work and mobile devices (perhaps in 7-10 years as that would require higher bandwidth than we currently have). We will then see the convergence/disappearance/ubiquity of Desktop, Phone, PDA and TV (as they become faster, smaller and everywhere). You will also see a convergence of Internet, TV, Gaming, Music and Movies into a ubiquitous, always on, telepresent, geo-aware, social media, computing cloud platform.