Leap • Hacker News Board

Re: Leap

#61

Post by mehuln » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 4:38 AM UTC

beefman wrote: post #49

robg wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an embodied cognition guy, I disagree here pretty strongly. Gestures are a powerful form of communication - consider deaf signers, scuba divers, even in time sensitive operations like military and sports. Gestures likely have a deeper evolutionary history than spoken language too. They are intuitive. Babies mimic long before they speak or manipulate.

Those are based on static symbols and are not used for precise, realtime control of a stateful 2-D system.

Pardon me for a shameless plug here, but I had jump in as this is an interesting discussion where we have at Flutter have long thought about it. We came up with a simple gesture to play/pause a song (itunes/spotify) by asking thousands of humans what gesture they would use if they did not have mouse/keyboard/voice. Almost everyone came up with the one we picked... even for next set of gesture, we're looking at static human gestures that are micro and intuitive (and doesn't make you fatigued).

When we released the first app, we got countless emails asking for hand-swipe as a next song gesture. We had felt a long ago that even though it seems natural it is completely impractical in certain context (i.e. coffee shop) and doing hand swipe 20 times starts to wear you down. It was important to try this number of times as same gesture can because to go to next slide or next photo or next album.

Hence, we ended-up picking thumbs-right and thumbs-left as metaphor: flutterapp.com/next

We will also hit our 4th Million gesture this month. That's 4 million times someone has either played or paused a song.

Please try our app and send feedback - would love to get your thoughts on this!

This is one of the best thoughtful discussion I've seen on this subject! thanks all for stimulating thoughts. I just thought I had something to share...

Re: Leap

#62

Post by no_more_death » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 4:50 AM UTC

robg wrote: post #38

jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no. The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for vi…

As an embodied cognition guy, I disagree here pretty strongly. Gestures are a powerful form of communication - consider deaf signers, scuba divers, even in time sensitive operations like military and sports. Gestures likely have a deeper evolutionary history than spoken language too. They are intuitive. Babies mimic long before they speak or manipulate.

Fred Brooks agrees. He broadly outlines a design system using gestures in The Design of Design. (I know that PHK already exceeded the quota for Fred Brooks references in a week; I guess, just get over it.)

Re: Leap

#63

Post by uvTwitch » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 7:26 AM UTC

I one day hope to be able to close an application on my computer by showing it my middle finger. It would make ragequits much more satisfying.

Re: Leap

#64

Post by serbrech » Thu, Aug 23, 2012, 7:47 AM UTC

jaysonelliot wrote: post #25

Please, for the love of Jef Raskin and Henry Dreyfuss and Don Norman and all that is human factors, no. The film version of Minority Report was not a model for practical or usable interface design. Millions of years of evolution have built our brains and bodies for interacting with things that provide physical feedback when we touch them. Waving a pencil in the air, "manipulating" an invisible item and looking for vi…

I agree that the lack of touch feedback is a terrible experience. But this is nevertheless an amazing piece of technology that opens new doors to a lot of applications (in the sense "apply", not software). We've seen what the community around Kinect has been able to build with much less powerful captors. I'm excited to see what people might imagine and achieve with this one. Moreover, nothing prevents you to couple this impressive captor with any other device that would provide you with other sensorial feedbacks. And why narrowing it down to a control device? Why couldn't it be used to gather other kinds of input? Monitoring activity? Assisted vision? Who knows what people have in mind for it?