An April issue of Businessweek has an Info Tech article on "Soon TVs and PCs May Work Like the Wii: Real-world devices with gesture-reading abilities are set to debut next year." The article starts off with a description of an avatar receptionist in Microsoft in Redmond, WA. The digital person peers out from a computer PC, talks and responds to visitors' gestures and voice commands. This reminds me of Microsoft's earlier experiment with an attractive but short-lived digital assistant (Ms. Dewey) in 2006?
Microsoft isn't the only company interested in gesture technology. Hewlett-Packard plans to add some gesture features to its Touch-Smart PCs, according to HP Personal Systems Group CIO Phil McKinney. This could be useful as assistive technology. Like any new technology, we will be surprised by how people actually use it -- or not.
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