But how do you get there to be a camera where you need it to be? Size isn’t even the problem, smartphones are already small and light enough. But are people supposed to cut a hole for the camera in their shirt pocket? Will we suddenly start to wear clothes with electronics in them? (The technology to make that happen already exists but we don’t seem to want to.)
This seems like a neat additional feature that would be pretty cool. If it wouldn’t add any extra hassle. It seems to me to be a very hard problem to get a camera to where you need it to be without adding any extra hassle for the user.
It seems like the real insight is the creation of a gesture system with spatial persistence by using one hand as a reference point shared by both the computer and the human, rather than the lapel-camera. The way in which the innovative gesturing system gets into the computer seems less important than the gesturing insight in the first place; this is the first gesture system that I've seen that seems like it might actually be useful. And now that someone's had the base idea, a couple of iterations of refinements and we might actually be somewhere.
(It seems like the gestures in Minority Report represented what people thought this would look like, but those always seemed almost impossibly floaty; one metric I use to determine how well a computer could possibly perform is "could a motivated human even figure out exactly what you meant?" and I'm not convinced the Minority Report interface meets that; pointing is a pretty imprecise thing, more than you might realize because the average person's 3D model of space is shockingly bad in some ways. Anyone who has learned to draw late enough in life to be able to observe the process of learning to draw, as I am fiddling with now, quickly learns that.)
Fasinating research, I'd love the opportunity to play with it. Obviously it's very early stages, but I wonder how long before we will realistically see stuff like this in production. 10 years? Sounds a lot but there's a lot of work to be done not only in terms of polishing the technology, but also in preparing the market for this kind of interface.
First step would be to establish a few simple gestures that everyone can learn rather than try to create an entire OS with it.
