Many will remember Tom Cruise in Minority Report, standing in front of a clear screen and methodically gesturing to manipulate data and run analyses. Are these kinds of interfaces possible and practical?
A recent report on work underway at Penn State University is about combining gestural interfaces and dialog to control geospatial interfaces. Its described at their GeoVista site. Designed to be used in high stress situations, such as emergency management centers, to help partipants collaborate and interact with complex geospatial data. There is also considerable attention paid to the use of such systems by non-expert personnel.
I have worked on some relatively primitive GIS systems, that linked multiple executive decision makers, and this would have been very useful. Note too the inclusion of behind the scene models to help users simulate multiple conditions. Ideas like these could radically change how we efficiently interact with data ... in the future you may be trained to do interactive data mining like playing a piano. ... Combining gestures and dialog is important, according to MacEachren.
"Spatial concepts are vague for computers," he said. "When a user tells a computer a location is 'near,' 'between' or 'north of' something, it has trouble interpreting what that means. But when you add hand gestures, the accuracy improves."
The technology is meant to work with large screen displays. For example, a crisis team tracking a hurricane might say, "Let's look at the population distribution here in the southeast" and gesture at a map on display, circling the region of interest.
The computer can interpret the combination of voice and gesture commands, zoom in the area and act on the next series of queries. The team member might gesture to indicate the possible track of the hurricane and ask the computer to display what areas would be most affected by flooding if the storm tracks north or south of the current location ...
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