Designing for Humans

Nintendo's Wii is a wireless game console, which is an interesting example of a gestural interface. It enables users to move a controller around and by doing so send commends that affect what's happening on the screen.

For a long time, gestural interfaces were restricted mostly to research labs and movies (who can forget Tom Cruise using his magic glove in Minority Report). Now they are starting to make their way into the mainstream consumer market.

A gestural interface converts body movement and hand gestures to computer commands. As such it allows the user to communicate with the computer in a more natural and efficient way, was a single movement may save a number of key strokes and mouse clicks. Obviously it cannot be used for everything and it's not meant to be used in order to type a document in Word.

As demonstrated quite well in the movie Minority Report, a gestural interface can be very effective when handling large amounts of data. It is much faster to move things around with your hands than with a mouse. Hand gestures are far richer than a single mouse move or mouse click. A great deal of gestural interfaces use special gloves and motion sensors to detect the user's movements. Nintendo's Wii uses a handheld controller, which captures movements and can be used in a variety of ways (playing golf, baseball, boxing etc.). From a gamer's point of view the experience becomes much immersive and engaging. However, there are many other applications in other domains which can benefit from such a device.