From the course: Creative Inspirations: Dale Herigstad & Schematic, Interactive Design Agency

Evolving media: Gestural navigation

Dale Herigstad: Gestural navigation is a passion of me personally. It's something that started with-- I guess the roots of it in traditional up/down/left/right navigation, which is very consistent with most television navigation that all of us are familiar with. But in the early part of around 2002, maybe seven or eight years ago, I worked along with some other groups on the development of the ideas for navigation in {italic}Minority Report,{plain} which is a very interesting experiment. It was interesting. Those of us who were doing this process of looking to the future, we also came up with the same idea that the input would probably be a future. And we thought that that would be 60 years down the road at the time. It's amazing how quickly that's come around. There was something that clicked in that particular movie. It's very popular, but if you ask people on the street, many people know that thing about gesture and that did an implant. In my opinion, it moved gesture as an idea forward and sort of made it happen. It's making it happen now because people still think of that. It's a metaphor in everyone's mind. I really believe in-- That was a case of visualizing something and putting it in front of, in that case, a really wonderful large audience. But much of the work that we do at Schematic is that same idea. It's saying if there's an idea then mock it up and do it and put it out there. When you visualize it, that's when people understand it and it can start making things happen ahead, ahead of time. In the movie, Tom Cruise had a glove with little detection things on it, or something in there. So, to me that was somewhat device-like. The vision that a bunch of us had about this, and it's my ongoing vision on this, is that you really don't need that. Because what's really being detected is actually hand gesture and hand motion, hand position and insigna- like signing. So any of this sort of material-- I am sort of resistant to the idea that you have to have something that you may not have. My hand is always here. It's always there, always ready to perform. So the purity of no device, no glove, no nothing, is such a beautiful, wonderful idea and hand gestures are something just, it's innate in us. I think that you could probably do cross- cultural studies that everyone uses their hands to mean things. I mean the Italians are wonderful at it, they do this, but it's all built into how we communicate. So using that idea, again this was that distance gesture showing that -- this is really interesting when you can touch the screen. What I am addressing now is when you can't, when you are distant from the screen. We have already at Schematic produced the example which I am going to show you of using just pure hand navigation to navigate through kind of typical, kind of, functions you would do on your television. What we discovered is the hand actually is providing language just like words, that sort of say certain things. So one of those is how do you activate the system? Because it's not an operation all the time. There is a moment when I want to use it but what am I signaling? What our path right now is to say, look, something you probably wouldn't do normally is hold your hand up and hold it still for about two seconds, two or three seconds. Then that's what tells it, that it activates it and then from there you choose a function. It's like a little menu system here that's directionally-based. Then you can do things like browse, adjust the volume and get things and the typical kind of things you would do on your TV. The last one would be deactivating, what you are doing to kind of turn it off. Because it's this transitory experience, all just using your hands. So the first example would be controlling volume. So what we did -- you'll see a little hand on here but you hold your hand up like this, you activate it, you flick the arrow over like that and now you just simply move up and down like this. Look at how easy that is, just sort of pick the volume, flip away when you are done. So just with a few little gestures, and I always like to call this for television, we are getting this down, the accuracy is getting accurate enough to call it, I would call it couch potato mode. So you really just sort of you go on the couch and just kind of go like that, just very minimal gestures to kind of do this. It is not iToy or Exercise Wii. This is like I am in casual mode of television. Here is an example of using that same for browsing content. So, again, I activate the system, push back, now I am going to go to the menu like that. Then I am going to take my hand, I am going to up through some things and here is a selection of kinds of things. Let's look at photos. It opens up and shows me what that would be. Here is movies. It opens up that. Let's go there. All this, like New, here is the list of new ones. This part of it demonstrates actually going through a list where it might be a long list and you might want to actually -- in that case we just flicked up to Page Up, so a flick is different than like just a normal motion. So the difference between a quick motion and an up-down, which works very nicely by the way, and now we select something. So we just changed it. We found another one, just change it just by a few hand gestures. One of my favorite parts of demonstration here is the player controls because most of the player controls really utilize a bunch of buttons. You've got a Play, Pause, Stop, Fast Forward, there is a bunch of things that you are processing. You may have to look at a remote to do that. But if you translate that into gesture, look at how simple this gets, where you can hold your hand up, start like this. So you will flick up to the player controls like that and then now you are anchored on it. You can take your hand and sweep it across the whole stretch of the movie on sort of a macro level. So here we moved it onto Chapter 6. Now let's go back here. We will go there and we will find something. Now we want to zoom in and go in little more detail. You grab and pull it and it opens up to a little more detail. Move along here like that. Once you have got the one you want, when you want you flick down and it will go to that point in the movie like that, just like that. So the purity of doing all those actions up there with just your hand, with no six buttons as you just did that. That's a really good example of using gesture and this actually works in our studio.

Contents