When Waving Your Arms About Isn’t Enough

WAAI – Waving Arms About Interface, as popularized by Minority Report with Tom Cruise (who is a bit ferrety if you ask me) was taken to a whole new level before Minority Report even came out by this little gem from Disclosure, starring Michael Douglas (who’s also fairly annoying).

(from)

Someone has <airquotes>imagineered</airquotes> the most hasslesome file-retrieval system in the (reasonable) universe – where you don’t only have to wave your arms around, you actually have to walk about, just like you’d have to do if computers weren’t actually invented and everything was still on bits of paper, and you were a filing clerk from the 70s.

There should be a word for this – Morphological-Mud-Stickery… where the design of a new system is based upon the design of the system it replaced… like designing a vacuum cleaner so it looks a bit like a broom… or a horseless carriage, so it looks like a horseless carriage.

WAAI will be good for games (in fact it already is). Wandering about inside a virtual environment will be great for games. Anything else? Forget it. Pain in the arse.