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by ugh
5779 days ago
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The elephant in the room seems to me to be camera placement. Current smartphones probably already have good enough cameras, they probably can already run the software and within a few years they might also have the batteries required to keep such a sophisticated system running for longer periods of time. 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. |
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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.)