gestures

The project that ended up winning the software design category of the Microsoft Imagine Cup worldwide finals in Sydney, Australia, and, consequently, the honor of taking home the shiny silver Cup itself, started innocently enough. A group of students from Ukraine noticed that several athletes at their school were hearing impaired, and they wanted to help them be able to communicate better. That desire turned into a pair of gloves, absolutely loaded with sensors, that can understand sign language gestures and translate them into text-based and audio speech with 90 percent accuracy.

Living in the Future is a new column about those rare moments, as we go about our daily lives, when we realize that what we're doing is amazing. We have a tendency to assimilate new tech into our lives without giving it much thought, or even without much gratitude, as Louis C.K. reminds us. But every once in awhile, we get that visceral "whoomph" while doing something as mundane as listening to music or playing a video game, and think: "Holy shit. I can't believe this is possible."

I haven't used a computer mouse in three years. That's all because of an app for Mac OS X called Multiclutch. MultiClutch was a game changer for me, a brief but epiphanic look at the future of computing. The idea: you can map keyboard commands to multitouch gestures. This does not sound like a big deal.

It is a big deal.

The overwhelming success of Microsoft's Kinect sensor is just now showing up in grainy photocopied forms--meaning, the ripoffs are emerging. But that's actually okay with us. Some of them work really well, and do things the Kinect, due to it being a third-party accessory, won't ever be able to do. We played with new gesture experiments from LG and Samsung, and we're kind of looking forward to the next year, when we can heave our remote controls out the window forever.

John Underkoffler looks at his desktop computer and sees an outmoded, inadequate tool. Trackpads and touchscreens, the former MIT instructor says, are limiting. Don’t even get him started on the mouse. The future, he says, is in gesture recognition-based interfaces, which he calls “spatial operating environments,” or SOEs.

A new robot can tell when it's being ignored, and it politely and subtly gets a person's attention. Researchers say the new computer vision system could help robots and humans interact more effectively, by allowing robots to use the same social cues as people.

Nokia recently hosted a cocktail party to introduce journalists to its chief designer, Alastair Curtis. The Brit's formal slide presentation was a carefully crafted marketing piece, hammering in his Finnish employer's slogans such as "beautiful to use" and "connecting people." And he provided a bright glimpse into the company's future plans in response to our questions.

The revelations started when Curtis described Nokia's record in America. "The U.S. hasn't been Nokia's strongest suit," he conceded. But the company aims to change that, having just completed a fact-finding trip around the States, where Americans were "talking about music, talking about gestures, talking about what they want for the future."

Talking about gestures?