So, i had the opportunity to use gspeak for the better part of a year at risd and what's probably not explicit from looking at demo videos is that you actually

So, i had the opportunity to use gspeak for the better part of a year at risd and what's probably not explicit from looking at demo videos is that you actually don't need to move around that much. The system is remarkably good at tracking motion and (more importantly) projecting your finger/gestures onto a much larger surface. Stop and think about that last point. If you're five or ten feet from a wall in your office and say you place a vector that runs perpendicular to your palm. It takes a surprisingly small amount of hand movement to get that vector to hit any portion of the wall. By the time i had gotten used to the system, i could use it usually by performing completely minimal gestures so much so that people didn't even realize i was engaging it explicitly. This is similar to how you can see people playing wii tennis on their couch without standing up. [1] If you read that sculley interview[2] you hear him talk about commoditizing the performance to create consumer products that react the way you expect them to. For me, gspeak convinced me that this was basically the case with a gestural interface, the hard part was figuring out something to do with it. I suspect this is a hard issue for many people because the majority of the complaints i see are basically "so what, i can't see myself using it" and fair enough, answering that question is really hard. But the underlying problem of how to provide that interface isn't your problem anymore, just like you don't have to figure out how to track touches or mouse movement anymore, you just build on top of that as a given. that seems like a net win to me. A large part of gspeak for end users and designers ends up being the development of a descriptive and non-conflicting gestural language for the task at hand. The folks at usc have a good example of what i mean [3]. Say what you will about wild gesticulating or how lame it seems, the system (as any other) is only as cool as what you do with it. [1]: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13/ [2]: http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full-interview-transcript/63295 http://www.cultofmac.com/john-sculley-on-steve-jobs-the-full... [3]: http://www.vimeo.com/8083372 http://www.vimeo.com/8083372