Wow, that sounds almost EXACTLY like the complaints many computer users had about using a mouse versus keyboard shortcuts.
Mouse being slow, needing a "good amount of dexterity," etc. to achieve simple actions. And yet I'd take a guess that 99% of computer users don't bother with keyboard shortcuts anymore even if they are orders of magnitude faster and 100% accurate (I still sometimes click on the wrong thing with a mouse if I'm in a hurry).
Now my point here isn't that motion controls will achieve as much universal popularity over conventional controls as the mouse did over keyboard controls but that sometimes "fastest" or "most accurate" or whatever isn't what people end up wanting to use. Sometimes things like intuitive and easy to understand is better.
We're still in the very early days of hands free control systems. It arguably took the computer mouse 21 years (prototype in 1963 to first mainstream useage in a Macintosh in 1984 with various less popular implementations in between) to get to a point where computer users would even consider it. Then arguably another 6 years from that until the first popular version of Windows (version 3.0) brought it to most PC users. And another 5 years from that before it started to become the defacto PC control method for the majority of computer users with Win95.
I imagine we'll be seeing massive experiementation with this before a solid and consistent method of control is settled upon.
Regards,
SB
You are telling us exactly what I am trying to explain : the mouse became the best intuitive tool to use the 'graphical interface' when 2D GUI became popular with Macintosh and Microsoft graphical operating system. In 80row text interface, the mouse is almost useless because interface is text oriented, and text input is done using a keyboard, so keyboard shortcuts was the way to go.
Nevertheless, even in graphical interface, keyboard shortcuts are still fully used, precise and 100% reliable, but needs to be memorized and integrated by the user. Mouse and keyboard are living together nowadays !
Same goes on with kinect/primesense technology. As it is actually applied to the actual interfaces, it does only mimic mouse or keyboards input scheme.
So for the moment, it is experimental and useless. Maybe it is more convenient for musuem and such situation where giving keyboard/mouse to public is full of annoyance and technical problems (usability, sanity, worn out, etc...) but even if the wow démo seems to be working, it is limited, slow and exhausting . And just keep in mind that human people always choose the lazy path (i.e. mouse keeps user memorize keyboard shortcuts)
I guess it will be difficult, need a long time to find a really usefull, effective and consistent scheme for handfree input devices.
Applied to gaming, the kinect system is at ease when the puppet is the player (dance central or all fitness gaming, no lag as the system is waiting on the virtual skeleton to match the attended position) but when the puppet-master is the human player, a 'steady' body seems really limited (walk in 3d space without walking in reality ? hu ? ) and for the moment, when the excitement fades, all I see for the moment is laggy and simple input scheme.
Interested in this new technology, but still waiting for something "woerth" it.
(I am french, sorry for the joke and my english)
