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The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive ... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.

D. Adams, The hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. Ch. 12.

BTW, a envisionment of natal in 1993, with datagloves: Charade, remote control of objects using free hand gestures published in Communications of the ACM. (Here for ps version)

The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive ... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.

D. Adams, The hitch-hikers guide to the galaxy. Ch. 12.

Is this what project natal will give us?
BTW, a envisionment of natal in 1993, with datagloves: Charade, remote control of objects using free hand gestures published in Communications of the ACM.

Software is meant to be free!

Assuming a competitive, market-based economy, any software of sufficiently broad usage is bound to become free, as its marginal production cost is null. The free software movement is not much more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. Software distinguishes itself from other works of the mind, such as music, in that its originality is by no means a part of its value or utility. As a consequence, the software industry is bound to live on the margins generated by software innovation and specialization

Using datagloves, I did quite a bit of work in 1993 to see how the sort of UIs that we see in the Minority Report could work.

It turns out that there are 2 issues to overcome:
- Fatigue: the gesture vocabulary had to consist only of short sequences.
- "immersion syndrome": whatever I do can be interpreted against my will.

By designing the gesture vocabulary so that it would require alternating tense postures and relaxed aiming gestures, it was possible to overcome those issues in a pretty satisfactory way. Tension is particularly important, as it conveys intention: if you stress "Go There", people (and machines) can detect the fact that you want something to happen, as compared to using a monocord voice.

see Charade: Remote Control Of Objects Using Free-Hand Gestures published in Communications of the ACM in 1994 for more details.

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The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive ... now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme. D. Adams, The hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, Chap. 2. 1979.

Using datagloves, I did quite a bit of work in 1993 to see how the sort of UIs that we see in the Minority Report could work.

It turns out that there are 2 issues to overcome:
- Fatigue: the gesture vocabulary had to consist only of short sequences.
- "immersion syndrome": whatever I do can be interpreted against my will.

By designing the gesture vocabulary so that it would require alternating tense postures and relaxed aiming gestures, it was possible to overcome those issues in a pretty satisfactory way. Tension is particularly important, as it conveys intention: if you stress "Go There", people (and machines) can detect the fact that you want something to happen, as compared to using a monocord voice.

see Charade: Remote Control Of Objects Using Free-Hand Gestures published in Communications of the ACM in 1994 for more details.

Parent poster definitely gets it right:

The Free Software Movement is not really driven by idealistic motives, but rather by a simple economic fact: because its marginal cost (i.e. the asymptotic cost of producing an extra copy) is null, free market forces and competition are bound to make all useful pieces of software freely available.

Note this is different from music or art in general: in art, the novelty/originality of a piece of work has an intrinsic value, which is not the case for software.

Some more elaboration of the idea: Software is meant to be free

The point of IBM, which seems inescapable, is that any software that has been released as OSS can't be reverted back to an non-OSS business model: as some version of the source and some user base exist on the market, any company with IBM's-like muscle can branch a free version and make it evolve anytime they want.

This follows the predicate: Any useful software is bound to become free (as in beer) once the cost of its development has been amortized. The free (as in speech) software movement is not much more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. Some still imperfect demonstration.

I'm not sure this first step will be fully successful, but it seems to me that Microsoft has no choice but to release sooner or later its control of the lower level layers of Windows:

Assuming a competitive, market-based, economy, any software of sufficiently broad usage is bound to become free, as its marginal production cost is null. The free software movement is nothing more than the social expression of this basic economical fact. As a consequence, the software industry is bound to live on the margins generated by software innovation and specialization.

Read more...

• Creation of an active zone to distinguish gestures addressed to the system from other gestures.
• Recognition of dynamic gestures to ensure smooth command input.
• Use of hand tension at the start of gestural commands to structure the interaction.

D. Adams, 1979 The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. chapter 12, first paragraph.

See also: Charade: remote control of objects using free hand gestures (1993)