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aneiPhone, Nintendo Wii show that consumers hunger for new gestural interfaces
Written by: Dennis SellersArticle Overview: Touch-free gestural interfaces—where the user can control a nearby TV or computer with the “wave of a hand”—will revolutionize the landscape in the “digital living room,” much as the Apple iPhone and Nintendo Wii did in their respective markets, says Jim Spare, CEO of 3-D sensor chip pioneer Canesta.
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aneiPhone, Nintendo Wii show that consumers hunger for new gestural interfaces
Touch-free gestural interfaces—where the user can control a nearby TV or computer with the “wave of a hand”—will revolutionize the landscape in the “digital living room,” much as the Apple iPhone and Nintendo Wii did in their respective markets, says Jim Spare, CEO of 3-D sensor chip pioneer Canesta.
The payoff for manufacturers and service providers, says Spare, will be new, must-have applications, significant revenue increases, and a greater market shares for the first movers. It’s probably just a matter of time before desktop Macs with gestural interfaces debut. As for the much-rumored Apple television set (as opposed to the Apple TV), if (and that’s a big IF) Apple doesn’t introduce such products, they’d be the first of their kind to integrate such technology.
Spare says that the gestural interfaces pioneered by the iPhone and Wii have enabled their makers to literally “burst out of the crowd” of increasingly similar products in otherwise stagnant markets, as users have flocked to the new, gesture-based products. The result is that Apple and Nintendo have been able to dominate their respective product categories, and command a premium over competitive devices with similar components and costs.
This momentum, Spare believes, will carry over to televisions and media computers, and will kick-start a new wave of innovation in the role of these devices in the digital home.
“It’s sort of like what happened with the Apple iPhone,” explains Spare. “Here you have an entirely new entrant to the mobile phone business, with its ‘1001’ SKUs, launch yet another device—at a premium price point no less—and in only one year divert billions of consumer dollars right into Apple’s pocket.”
Spare says that the iPhone’s multi-touch, gestural interface not only provided a new experience that users found to be fun and convenient, but created an easy-to-use user interface platform that widely inspired new applications. Apple’s successful App Store – the thriving, online market for iPhone applications built on the successful iPod-iTunes model – is the proof. And the same is about to happen with televisions and PCs, he maintains.
As the first proof point for TVs, Spare cites the superb reception in January to prototype demonstrations of a gesture-controlled Hitachi television at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (see Hitachi Chooses Canesta’s 3-D Sensor Chip to Power World’s First Gesture Controlled TV, January 08, 2009).
“The excitement among attendees and media observers was widespread, and there was much talk about how this would change the digital living room,” he reports.
Consumers were first widely introduced to the touchless gestural interface in Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report, where the character played by Tom Cruise orchestrated several large forensic computer displays with a ballet of hand gestures. It wasn’t long before the concept was showing up routinely in popular TV series like CSI: Miami, as producers rushed to be au courant.
“In a sense,” says Spare, “this widespread media exposure has locked and loaded the entire marketplace, and Hitachi has, essentially, fired the first shot.”
The Hitachi demo was enabled by a unique, low-cost 3-D sensor chip pioneered by Canesta.
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About the Author: Dennis Sellers RSS for Dennis's articles - Visit Dennis's website  Click here to visit Dennis's website   Apple wont a buy EA b buy Twitter c launch its own game console Apple among Global Green 100 for corporate leadership in IT energy efficiency Apple should NOT cut Mac prices By my new way of calculating it Apple is the number one computer vendor in the US Maybe with femtocell technology Ill finally get an iPhone |
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