Gesture Based User Interface

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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Microsoft officially announced their new operating system -- System 7 on the 22nd of October. 

It is supposed to be a stable platform for new applications.  One of the first will be directing multi-media files to devices in your home or office, if you are so equipped.  This will allow you  to direct videos and audios to your home entertainment system or files to a print server.

The user interface is gesture based and two handed.  This has been popularized on CNN over the last 8 months as their 'magic board'. 

Depending on the PC you buy, it will use a touch sensitive screen.  This can be done quite easily with x and y optical sensors based on infrared or making the screen capacitance sensitive.

The user gestures on the screen to produce results.  An item can be picked with a finger touch or two.  Gestures can be programmed to mean things like zoom or un-zoom.  You can move items off the desktop with a flick of your hand.

Sound new and great!  It's hardly new.  Gesture based user interfaces have been around for well over 50 years. 

In the early 60's voltage  pens were used to touch the screen.  Sometimes digitizing tablets were used in front of the display.  They worked well because you could combine many commands into a single poke.

Later light pens were in vogue on major graphic displays.  The mouse took over for good in the early 80s.  Why didn't the light pen dominate?

It turns out that doing gestures on high intensity applications makes the user tired ... surprisingly so.  That's why light pens faded away.

The touch sensitive screens will be good, if you keep your mouse handy and let the gestures work when you need them.  Lots of restaurants use gesture based screens for ordering and accounting

This technology has been around for a long time and it's on I-Phone now.  Please watch for it everywhere.

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30/10/2009 09:00 PM

One  more thing.  How do some of these gestures work? 

Let's take an example.  Suppose you want to zoom in on an area  You could make a circle type gesture on the screen in the area of interest.  The computer captures your motion and it looks at a 3 by 3 matrix that spans it.

If your gesture traverses in any order 1,2,3,6,9,8,7,4 and 1, then it believes you want to zoom.  Of course the matrix can be refined and its extent is oriented  around the centre of gravity

 

1	2	3
4	5	6
7	8	9

Another way to do this is two handed or two fingered where one finger goes in 1 and the other 9 and the movement is 1 away from 9.  Clearly other movements from other cells will work too.