[ExI] wii controllers

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 11:43 AM, Kelly Anderson <kellycoinguy at gmail.com> wrote:
> The Kinect is the next mouse. It won't replace the mouse any more than
> the mouse replaced the keyboard, but I think it will have just as much
> impact, and not just in games. What I'm really excited about is
> changing the focal length, and tweaking the recognition, so that the
> Kinect will work on a person sitting at their desk from, say, the top
> of their laptop. Then you can recognize individual finger joint
> positions, facial expressions, and of course gross movements. That's
> going to be really big. There is absolutely zero reason that this
> can't and won't be the case in three years.

I can.  The mouse came with software and applications to do what
could not previously be done as easily, such as spreadsheets (and the
entire concept of a graphical operating system).  The Kinect's
suggested applications, so far that I've seen, are not that revolutionary.

It's the applications that drive hardware.  What task, that most people
do (or would do if it were practical), does the Kinect enable?  What
can finger joint positions, facial expressions, and gross movements
communicate to a computer that can not be communicated as
readily through point and click?

The only applications I can think of are niche (emotional context,
which requires software to interpret and make use of that), not
attributable to this ("this will make communication so much more
intuitive" - not without other improvements that could as easily be
piled on point and click too), ignorant of reality (see "gorilla arm" for
why touch screens didn't catch on more widely), or outright false
(such as assuming it is easier to master 100 hand signals than
moving a cursor to the right point on a 10*10 grid and clicking).