July 17, 2010

Touchless multi-touch in 3D

As I wrote some time ago, human-machine interaction is going towards the interesting trends we saw in futuristic films years ago. Here is another example of a human-machine interface which reminds us particularly of “Minority Report”. A man is gesticulating with both his hands free in space and on a screen you can see a 3D scene performing appropriate actions.

That’s impressive!

But because I’m seeing some disadvantages with this technology for me it isn’t such impressive anymore. The disadvantages or let’s say challenges are:

  • One has to hold his arms continuously in free space, for sure that’s exhausting.
  • What if there are more than two hands / one user? Are the algorithms able to match the hands to the right persons or will there be false recognized (inter)actions?
  • In my opinion the user gestures were adapted to the technology not to real user needs / perceptions.
  • The actions are not accurate enough yet.
  • In the case of the deletion of files some other way would be much better than to move the files to the edges I think. Because this action suggests me that there will be a backup of the files and I#m able to load them again.

And beside the other details a main goal for future investigations has to be to remove the need that a user has to recheck visually what he is doing with his hands (red cross and borders in the video and so on). The user wants to e.g. translate a picture, commands that with his hands and that’s it. The extra necessity to visualize that destroys the / my sensations.

But the technology (free hand gestures and 3d scenes) is a really great step into future!

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