Andy Wilson and a mindless future

In the course of one local discussion, I mentioned a video about an interesting “non-mouse type manipulator” seen somewhere “in tubes”. Fold your fingers as if you are holding a glass and move your hand over the keyboard. That you drive the cursor on the desktop. “Release the glass” and then “grab” - it was you who clicked the mouse. Do the same with two hands - “multitouch”. And now look at how it actually works - I found the video:


The manipulator consists of a video camera for thirty bucks and a certain amount of program code. The solution is strikingly beautiful - the video image is analyzed for the emergence of an isolated, unchanging area. Even several areas - each is equal to one cursor.

Please note - again, two cursors are used only for zoom and rotation in the plane of the screen, “tilt”. In this case, "tilt" can be done at all with one hand - rotating brush.
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The author (or one of the authors) is Andy Wilson , a researcher at Microsoft Research. If you look at Andy's projects, you can suspect him of being involved in the creation of MS Surface (and Google confirms that we are right in this matter).

Here are some of the developments of his group:

TouchLight . Actually, from what Surface grew, as I understood.

GWindows . Andy figs and fills his voice with windows and draws.

XWand . This magic wand, in contrast to the concept of Artem Gorbunov , does not limit the scope of its activities to the screen, and maybe turn off your lamp and brew coffee.

In general, the mouse, of course, does not go anywhere. But more often it will be more convenient for us to communicate with computers without its help.

[Supplemented]

Disclamer:

1. This is a prototype. Therefore, to say that it will not work in the dark and will eat resources is very early.

2. This is a prototype. Therefore, it’s too early to say that your hands will hurt after the photo-photography “with this thing”.

3. This is not a "mouse killer." This is a prototype of another interface that may die in a year, may in a couple of cases replace the mouse, and may cause a new type of civilization to appear.

Late offer

Try to imagine the uses of the interface described. I have already cited a few in the comments:

- Brush-mouse. You drive a "glass" in the place where you now have a mouse, your brush always rests on the table and does not get tired, your laptop is being followed by a camera built into the corner of the display;

- Infokiosk, not spreading the infection. You do not touch a single detail of the infokiosk - neither the touchscreen, nor the keyboard, nor the mouse. The probability of "catch infection" is excluded.

- Keyboard. For slow dialing, for example in infokiosks. The buttons work when the “ring” of fingers is closed over them. As a result, the seal becomes similar to bursting bubbles in bubble plastic packaging.