Author: William Scheinman

View from the Mountain The physical and digital worlds are converging. The process has occurred over time, caused by the advent of sensors that turn physical events into digital data. The next iteration of convergence is here, and is set to explode onto the market: gesture-based technologies, which interpret and react to human movement. Gesture-tech has taken time to gain mainstream momentum. In 2010, The New York Times summed its history up nicely—it is “one of the most significant changes to human-device interfaces since the mouse appeared next to computers in the early 1980s, but no significant products have gotten much traction.” The lull is now over. The Explosion Gesture-tech’s applications are only limited by imagination. It can be applied to sign language, so the deaf can transcribe their movements into text. It has been applied in rehabilitative medicine, to dictate diagnostic robots interaction with patients. The entertainment industry also stands to benefit. Increasingly complex and realistic video games have been able to leverage the technology to build increasingly human movement in the models and refine artificial intelligence. Gesture-tech can even interpret and respond...