Opera Adds Gesture Navigation

Trepidity writes "The Opera web browser appears to be the first to add gesture-based navigation (made popular recently in the game Black&White) as a standard feature. You can perform a bunch of common actions with simple gestures, such as holding down the right mouse button moving left and releasing to go back, or moving up then down while holding the button to reload the current page. A list of the various implemented commands can be found on their site." I've been playing a fair amount of B&W lately - the interface took a bit to learn, but once you['ve got it done, it's actually a very efficent system of getting around - the use within the Web might finally take the Web beyond just a point and click interface. Maybe. Probably not. CT: Just don't try it with a thinkpad style nipple mouse. My wrist lost feeling. Update: 04/18 02:55 PM by T : Read more below for a software project that promises to spread some gestural goodness even further.

Mike Bennett writes with news of his "free software project. It's called wayV, and provides gesture recognition for X. Version 0.1 was released a while ago and let you start applications with gestures, version 0.2 will be released this week and also includes the ability to send keypress, e.g. make a gesture to change desktops, etc." This looks like a modestly conservative 0.1, too;)

Comments

Wait for Amazon's new patent...

[Basilisk]

... on one gesture shopping.

Oops. My mouse slipped.

Gestures vs. Typed Commands

[Bonker]

This is the (real) innovation we've been waiting for. It's just sad that it came out of a game house instead of application programmers.

Think about it: The one reason that many people think that command prompt shells are superior to 'gruntnclick' is that the ability to use written language and commands is infinitely more flexible than typical WIMP operations. Despite the fact that it's slower than Grandma before she's had her prunes, most of the developers I know eventually drop down to csh or bash to get 'any real work' done.

Gesture systems, provided in combo with typical WIMP operations, have the potential to change that. If there is a gesture for every non-destructive command, and gestures can be stacked so that you can direct the output of one gesture command into another, you've created a truly flexible and intuitive command interface.

I've been playing B&W since it came out, and in only a couple weeks, I can shoot fireballs and sheild spells around like no one's business. I suspect that this will be true for a great majority of computer users. Not all, but enough to make the project worth it.

Zoom into an image in photoshop, select a square capture to clipboard, paste into new image. If I can do that with a few gestures rather than 8 different menu commands, I will have sped up my image processing dramatically without having to write a complex script or plugin to do it for me.

Now Lionhead has talked a little bit about releasing their source code if the game becomes popular enough. What I would like to see is source for their gesture recognition systems so that it can be integrated into KDE and Gnome, and OS plugins for Win32 and MacOS. With the level of interest in this new system, that may not even be necessary.

This *will* work. Get behind it, guys!