The advent of user-interfaces that operate via touch and gesture have allowed much earlier access to technology. I am thinking of children, and specifically, my own. I have two boys, a four year old and a two year old, and both are completely fluent with our iPad and iPhones. The boys were introduced to the devices about nine months ago, and it took each of them around ten minutes to figure out how to operate the interfaces relatively seamlessly. After being shown only one time, my two year old was consistently using either the "Home" button, or the four finger "grab" gesture to navigate back to the home screen on the iPad when he was done with a game.
Observing my children with these devices made me aware of how intuitive many of the gestures that we use with our touch-based interfaces are. As mentioned in the History page of this blog - the mouse is an incredibly abstract concept - movement on one plain translates to another and clicking buttons represents touching something on the screen. As fluent as my children are with touch technology, even the older one has difficulties when using a mouse, and he will often reach up and simply touch the desktop's screen when he becomes frustrated.
The rate that technology is improving and increasing will only continue to grow, and it will do so in an exponential manner - one needs only to look at the advances made in the past decade. This being the case, it makes sense that our means for communicating with technology should also continue to advance to something that is as intuitive as possible. And this notion also leads me to believe that as impressive as the gesture-based systems of Oblong's G-speak are (see the History and Software/Hardware pages), I feel that we will ultimately move more in the direction of the holograms that visualized in the Jarvis sequence that I highlighted in the intro. As people, I believe we will want to touch what we are interacting with, and as intuitive as the G-speak/Minority Report gestures are, ultimately we need to move to an interface that merges the motor, tactile, vocal, and visual components of interacting with our technology.
Francis Tsai:
http://teamgt.com/
In addition to providing more intuitive accessibility, the technologies that will develop around gesture based computing can be put to use in expanding accessibility for those with physical handicaps as well. The artist Francis Tsai comes immediately to mind. Tsai is a well-known illustrator and concept artist in the gaming community who in recent years has started to succumb to the debilitating effects of ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease. He gradually lost the ability to draw with his hands, so he resorted to using a mouse to draw digitally, and eventually lost even that mobility. Tsai currently uses a Tobii PCeye to control his computer, the technology utilizes eye-tracking software that enables Tsai to execute commands and continue to create brilliant artwork using only his eyes.
Francis Tsai Drawing:
It is in this incredible accessibility that gesture-based computing's greatest strength lies. Whether it is creating opportunities for humans to begin interacting with our increasingly digital world at an even earlier age, or presenting new opportunities for interaction that were thought lost, there is no doubt that we will continue to see that boundaries of user interface pushed in more intuitive, and ultimately human, directions.
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