The Keyboard Is Broken...
So I'm waiting for my gesture controls. And I know, I'll be waiting a while.
But hear me out, even the promise of ergonomically designed keyboards has failed, let alone mice that aren't properly designed for interacting with your hands.
We hammer our fingers against plastic countless times per day. Given, it's minute strains, that builds up if we sit at a computer all daylong, impacting our fingertips.
One 500-word article with an average of 6-letter words, will have you slam the keys at a very minimum of about 3,500 times (and that's not including corrections or punctuation). That may only be a 10-15 minute period of your day. Think all day-long, or one year of work. I can't even math that one out. Not to mention all the problems the repetitive motion causes. Arthritis. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Occupational Overuse Syndrome.
As Colin McSwiggen points out in his recent article Against Chairs, in which he rails against all seats for being designed to be designed by designers:
No one even knows what a “good” chair would have to do, hypothetically, let alone how to make one.
It's not so different with keyboards and mice either. Interaction has long taken precedence over natural movement, with a smattering of ergonomics. And as McSwiggen quotes architectural sociologist Galen Cranz, "ergonomics is "confused and even silly.""
So bring on gestures control. Labs are already working on it several different styles. Disney and Microsoft released a great intro to their Touché, a program that recognizes and reacts to different types of touch: palm, one-fingered, thumbs, even recognizes elbows on a table and more complex interactions. But I won't spoil it for you, check out the video.
While I can't see typing out a post using solely gestures from my elbows and thumbs, the capacity for recognizing different movements, and quirks, is limitless for interactive navigation, tied in with voice recognition we would scarcely need touch interfaces anymore.
The main obstacle (I think, feel free to add or edit) is individuality – which current design doesn't recognize anyway. Not to mention cultural differences in interaction. But those differences are no greater than recognizing a thumb touch from a finger touch, as Touche can do. And remember that most humans can barely do this, without some visual reinforcement.
So it's not that far off, one cool app that does this right now is Flutter. It's very basic – and can only stop and start your music and videos – but it's a step in the right direction for gesture control. It's immediate, it's intuitive (and it's free).
Eventually, if our interfaces can recognize our individual styles of movement, minute quirks, gestures, and even our subconscious – yet physical – reactions, we could be close to adapting our interfaces to our individual self. And that's immediately adaptable for healthcare, non-intrusive monitoring, and even managing our home environment. We can already detect blood sugar, heart rate, and brainwave activity without touch.
On a consumer level, imagine having your immediate environment noticing your pupils react when the light is too bright, or the face you make when the music is too loud, or how your skin reacts when you feel a slight chill in the air.
Or, at the simplest, imagine a world where our children don't have to suffer through monotonous typing classes.
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