I love this…and I think we're going to get to "gesture fatigue" pretty quickly here. We all had to learn a whole bunch of new things when smartphones (and the iPhone in particular) came out … "pinch-to-zoom" and the like. And now OS X Lion is introducing a whole new set of gesture-based interface items. Now on the horizon are "bending" gestures and such.
Link: Thin-film flexible 'paperphone' created
Ok, it all looked cool in the movies when Tom Cruise did this kind of stuff the first time. And it does make new capabilities easily accessible, if you know all the gestures. So, what about you…does this Cambrian explosion of interface capabilities make things easier for you to interact with your devices, and the world? Or does it make things overly complex?
Way too complex.
While I’ve given up hope that we’ll ever adopt Doug Engelbart’s chord keys and mouse combo, this direct manipulation thing is going ever farther in the wrong direction. Gesturing is inherently ambiguous, and especially with today’s input devices, the number of distinct commands that are both memorable and easy for the system to interpret successfully is small — especially as compared with (say), a 26 letter alphabet and two bucky-bits on the keyboard.
Besides, skin oil on displays is gross.
Oh, well — you can imagine the first things I did after installing Lion.
dbk, not Tom Cruise
I almost invariably fall back on the ten principles for good design identified by Dieter Rams whenever evaluating consumer technology products. I’d say it fails based on those principles. But thinking about how it could be used to redefine the limits of three dimensional interfaces, now that has potential.