it’s ok to move again
Accelerometers and other types of motion sensors are increasingly finding their way into technological appliances of all kinds, serving different purposes. Just to give you a few examples:
Apple’s newer generation portable computers are equipped with a Sudden Motion Sensor, which signals the hard disk to ‘park its head’ to protect itself when ‘sudden motion’ is detected. User-based innovation opened up new purposes for the sensor and led to games such as BubbleGym in which the sensor is used to turn ’tilting your laptop’ into a game interface to roll a ball across a playing field (to name but one example).
The technology is apparently also making its way into mobile phones, which reminds me of Doors of Perception 7 Flow in 2002, where Open Doors Grand Prix winner Jussi Ängeslevä showcased his inspiring ideas and experiments on the fascinating topic of body mnemonics, using different body movements/postures to control devices (see winner’s page).
Obviously, today’s most fashionable example of the technology put to use is Nintendo’s Wii-remote which is apparently not limited to young gaming audiences, but invading retirement homes keeping the oldies fit. Similarly, Activity based videogames – a craze in Japan since a long time – like Dance Dance Revolution (aka Dancing Stage) is proving a helpful aid in fighting obesity.
Put to more artistic uses, the Body Language User Interface or Blui allows one to draw/sculpt via 3D gestures (with joystick and wand however).
Aside from devices detecting in which way they are being moved, a lot of research effort is also going into gesture recognition by devices(see here for list of more info).
These are but a few examples of how ‘moving’ is back and one could go on for hours. It will be fascinating to see where such increased interest and ability in dynamic, full body movement modes of interaction will take us. Obivously it has high potential to lead to ever more ‘human(e)’ types of interfaces and interaction patterns, since the human ability to move is placed at the center of design and development.
For a long time (cf. VR gloves etc.) more subtle gesture based interfaces have been trying to free us from mouse and keyboard, trying to put the human user at the center again, making the machinery adjust to the human condition instead of vice versa. Many tend to forget however that Doug Engelbart, when he developed the mouse (which by the way he used in a different way than we do now), was working along the lines of a philosophy aka ‘Intelligence Augmentation‘, which in a sense contained several notions nowadays associated with user-centredness, designing technology to assist the user instead of the other way around (make sure to have a look at The Mother of all demos).
Rather than purely technical issues, some of the more fascinating challenges in interpreting movement are context awareness and meaning.
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