More devices are being equipped with what’s technically known as “perceptual user interface,” or PUI -- the capacity to recognize and respond to mere human gestures. Some recent examples are the recent unveiling of motion and gesture controlled gaming devices by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.
Do those announcements, and others -- like the Canesta system that lets you control your television or DVR with the wave of your hand -- presage an imminent wave of, well, waving, pointing, and other gesturing to operate the gear in our homes?
Maybe not, according to a panel on new user interfaces at a Consumer Electronics Association conference last week. The panel spent more time talking about other ways to interact.
Like haptics: the technology where a surface interfaces with a user through the sense of touch. It’s already available on some touch screens in the form of vibration feedback. Certain Samsung phones, such as the Memoir and Impression , for example, offer vibration feedback to help you locate the keys on its virtual keyboard, and know when you are depressing them. There is also voice recognition, a recent addition to the upcoming iPhone 3.0 operating system, which the panel agreed, could unleash a host of third-party apps using voice controls.
The challenge with gesture control, as one panelist put it, is that we don’t have any universal body language for a lot of the actions we’d want gesture control to accomplish. For example, there’s no widely shared gesture that means “turn it off,” so programmers would need to invent one, and then hope users would be willing to learn it.
Where such a language does exist, though, gesture control has great potential. Prime example, according to Gabe Zichermann of beamME, a cell-phone application company: Gesture control aimed at the hearing-impaired, which has potential to use the universal gestures of sign language to enable a huge range of applications and functions.
Meantime, it’s unclear how well the gaming-related gesture announcements, at E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Expo) in Los Angeles, will work in practice. While the best way to judge any controller or control system is through personal use, E3 did show what work is being done on the next wave of user interface, and where video game makers think the market is going.
Sony showcased Playstation's first attempt at a next-gen motion controller. The demonstration model was an engineering prototype — according to the video reports posted on the GameTrailers website — that looked more like a stunted lightsaber than a controller, and was still awkward even for Sony’s user to handle at this early stage. Then there was the new Wii motion remote by Nintendo, which claims to give gamers a more realistic experience than the previous generation, but that remains to be seen by consumers.
Microsoft’s much-hyped ‘Project Natal’ also premiered at E3.
This is a gesture control system that senses the player’s actual movements, and
then mimics them on screen, making it a true total motion controller — because
the user's body is the control (see the E3 demonstration). What do you think: does gesture control have a future in computers, or would you be more comfortable with touch screens and voice recognition? —Will Dilella and
Paul Reynolds
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