Gesture-based interfaces are the way of the future – but it could be a path set with user barriers if we don’t identify a set of intuitive and consistent gestures for standard commands.Gesture-based interfaces have been around almost as long as computers have had displays. Light pens first appeared in the late 1950’s (predating even the trackball and mouse) and were briefly popular in the 1980’s. The Palm device line was extremely popular from the late 1990’s (even though they came with a stylus you only managed to keep for a week before it was never seen again!). And in recent years, my wife has been wowing her students with the Tablet PC she uses daily for teaching class.
However, those devices simply allow you to poke, tap, or scribble gestures on a fairly standard interface of windows, icons, menus and pointers. As useful as these attempts were to provide a more natural interaction, they did little to bridge the “computer world” with the “real world”.
In the computer world we’ve largely been reduced to poking at things with one finger at a time through the on-screen pointer, whereas in the real world we’ve learned to use all ten digits and both hands together. Consequently, we’ve never been able to signal our intent to computers using the full range of our capabilities.
Perhaps that’s why they’ve never felt very natural to us.
Check out the full article The multi-touch interface challenge