

Imaginary Interfaces - LukeG
http://www.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/baudisch/projects/imaginary_interfaces.html

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ugh
The elephant in the room seems to me to be camera placement. Current
smartphones probably already have good enough cameras, they probably can
already run the software and within a few years they might also have the
batteries required to keep such a sophisticated system running for longer
periods of time.

But how do you get there to be a camera where you need it to be? Size isn’t
even the problem, smartphones are already small and light enough. But are
people supposed to cut a hole for the camera in their shirt pocket? Will we
suddenly start to wear clothes with electronics in them? (The technology to
make that happen already exists but we don’t seem to want to.)

This seems like a neat additional feature that would be pretty cool. If it
wouldn’t add any extra hassle. It seems to me to be a very hard problem to get
a camera to where you need it to be without adding any extra hassle for the
user.

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jerf
It seems to me it might be easier to put localizer gloves on the user instead.
They wouldn't even have to be gloves in the traditional hand-covering sense,
just enough to stay on the hand and provide orientation, just little skeleton
things.

It seems like the real insight is the creation of a gesture system with
spatial persistence by using one hand as a reference point shared by both the
computer and the human, rather than the lapel-camera. The way in which the
innovative gesturing system gets into the computer seems less important than
the gesturing insight in the first place; this is the first gesture system
that I've seen that seems like it might actually be useful. And now that
someone's had the base idea, a couple of iterations of refinements and we
might actually be somewhere.

(It seems like the gestures in Minority Report represented what people thought
this would look like, but those always seemed almost impossibly floaty; one
metric I use to determine how well a computer could possibly perform is "could
a motivated human even figure out exactly what you meant?" and I'm not
convinced the Minority Report interface meets that; pointing is a pretty
imprecise thing, more than you might realize because the average person's 3D
model of space is shockingly bad in some ways. Anyone who has learned to draw
late enough in life to be able to observe the process of learning to draw, as
I am fiddling with now, quickly learns that.)

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user24
very interesting how making an L-shape with the left hand somehow makes the
imaginary space more concrete in the user's mind. You can really see and
understand that the user percieves the interface as existing, moreso than if
they were interacting in an unframed way. In other words, I think the L-shape
is key to grounding users, it gives a rudimentary starting shape to the
interface.

Fasinating research, I'd love the opportunity to play with it. Obviously it's
very early stages, but I wonder how long before we will realistically see
stuff like this in production. 10 years? Sounds a lot but there's a lot of
work to be done not only in terms of polishing the technology, but also in
preparing the market for this kind of interface.

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mortenjorck
For consumer electronics, this seems like it could find very appropriate
applications on minimal-UI devices like the iPod Shuffle.

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ThomPete
I think you hit the nail on the head.

First step would be to establish a few simple gestures that everyone can learn
rather than try to create an entire OS with it.

