Another TED talk, this one from artist Golan Levin which is well worth a watch regarding interface and interaction. Some really interesting ideas:
"the mouse is the narrowest straw you could try to suck all of human expression through"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G0MzlfMPuM
Some really interesting work on synethsesia; a subject which came up a few times during the first lab. I suppose whether an interface is to be used for public interactivity, productivity, or fun, there needs to be a synethetic element where responses are natural, transparent and predictable. The example of the "mouaba" and the "takenaka" are really interesting becuase they show that the metaphors for interaction can be quite abstract. I think I mentioned something like this in relation to sound when we were in the mocap suite; that the type of foley sounds used in martial arts films reflect a physical movement: we dont need to think too hard to correlate between audio and visual if the "shape" corresponds.
Gestural interfaces have been in existance for many years, in particular on tablets and touch phones / pdas dating back to before 2000, but no one, that I know at least, uses them. Why? perhaps its because all gesture systems are merely fluffy keyboards, meaning that the user may have to try a few times to perform what could be achieved with one keypress. They are not "on" or "off" like a mouse button or key press, and the gesture is either correctly performed or not, so they are an expressive analogue interface which is stripped down to a bare 0 or 1. Sadly then, gestures, in the eyes of developers, will be used to open web browsers; the web browser is either open, or it isn't.
Perhaps, then, the "gait" of the gesture needs to be more important than the gesture itself, allowing an infinately more expressive and detailed interface than the button or slider… but how can any application handle nuanced gestures? Why have so few developers tried? Do we need to classifiy tasks or software which is gesture suitable such as music software, and that which isnt such as word processors?