Wave goodbye to gesture-free PCs

In 2017, when you spot members of staff gesticulating at their PCs, it will be more likely that they are hard at work than losing at poker.

Over the next 10 years, we’ll see a lot more use of gestures around computers in the workplace. We can expect the man-machine interface to mobilise human faculties much more than it does at present.

You want proof? Since 8 December, Nintendo has sold 200,000 Wii games consoles in the UK alone. These consoles are significantly different to the others on the market. Each comes complete with a handheld, point-and-click wireless controller that’s also motion-sensitive – “letting you”, as Nintendo’s web site has it, “twist, lunge, tilt, and lift your way to gaming greatness”. You get feedback on your progress by feeling rumbles through it, too.

In an essay in the 367-page doorstopper Total Interaction: Theory and Practice of a New Paradigm for the Design Disciplines (Birkhäuser, 2006), Bern University professor Bernd Kersten confirms the hint given to us by the Wii. The IT user’s body language and “simulated experiences of touch and acceleration” will, Kersten says, join morphed-for-beauty, on-screen faces as part of the future landscape of input/output mechanisms in IT – up there with keyboard, mouse, loudspeakers and, as I’ve argued here before, the human voice.

But waving isn’t the only thing computers will come to register. Since 1995, Omron, a Kyoto-based specialist in sensing and control components, has used cameras and IT so as to make the face a key input device. I recommend the Omron web site for its discussion of “face sensing”.

Gesture-sensitive interfaces look certain, but then so do panics about gambling at work. Morse reports that online gambling conducted in British workplaces is so prevalent, and increasing so fast, that firms need to create an internet usage policy to deal with it – a policy that “must be adhered to and enforced”. That’s especially true, Morse says, given that 28 percent of its respondents didn’t know what their organisation’s internet usage policy was in the first place.

So, by 2017, we can expect to see more computers controlled by bodies and faces, and offices will be full of users excitedly gesticulating in front of their workstations. The trouble then becomes one of discerning which users are working and which are actually having a severe physical reaction to losing £1,000 on some nag in the 3:30 at Plumpton.

What to do? There will be a big discussion on just how much IT chiefs should allow staff to be punters. Already, Morse advises: “Businesses need to decide if it is acceptable for their office workers to place a quick bet online and, if so, where they will draw the line and decide it is impacting on productivity.”

But wait. When, in the future, you see an unlucky user throw their hands up in dismay at yet another fruitless flutter, don’t just rush into repression. Just ask yourself one thing first: have you made work so boring for your colleagues that, though they are wrong to be distracted, it’s you and your leadership that are the real losers at work?