The XBox 360 Kinect motion sensor took interactive gaming to a new level upon it's release. At the MIT Media Lab, the Fluid Interface group is looking to do for the keyboard and mouse what Kinect did for the gaming controller: get rid of it entirely. The team developed DepthJS, a software extension for Google Chrome that allows Javascript to talk to Microsoft's Kinect, allowing users to browse web pages by gesture alone.
Interactivity exhibited by the Kinect-Windows bridge is vaguely reminiscent of an earlier exploration into gestural technology, namely the more hands-on Microsoft Surface, which relied on the multi-touch technology we now, thanks to the iPad, consider commonplace.
See web-only content:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/browse-the-web-with-your-bare-hands/67160/
Both multi-touch and motion capture technology have their pitfalls, but it'll be interesting to see how Microsoft might adapt both forms of user engagement into future products.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/browse-the-web-with-your-bare-hands/67160/
