Tangential Interfaces

Joseph’s Glove of Many Colours

Eventually Waving Arms Around Interfaces will come of age, and you’ll just kindof swim in this sphere of digitised perception, where the machine can see and interpret everything you do. In the meantime though you’ll need to wear batty gloves.

I still don’t get the point of these though. If it was keyboard design instead of mouse design, it would be similar to having one key over there and another over here, and another one on the other side of the room etc etc. We should be moving less, not more.

Unless you want to wave your arms about of course, in which case knock yourself out. Litterally. Knock yourself out with your own wii wand.

W.A.A.Is are an attempt to turn knowledge work back into manual labour. Mouse-interface is kindof one dimensional, though, granted.

—

This kindof rings bells though:

When I was straight out of Uni and didn’t give a toss about anything except playing guitar… but found myself working in the credit-card department of Lloyds, I used to fantasize about having a guitar interface onto a keyboard. I even made simulated strings with paperclips on the arm of my chair so I could practice archipeligos.

Although I’m theoretically stupider now than I was then, I can now see fairly clearly that the two aren’t going to mix terribly well – because the interface wouldn’t be happening at a physical level – there would have to be a link between the meaning and poetry of musical language, and the… well… RPG2 basically. Not going to happen. It’s like converting your name to a musical scale. It is not (generally speaking) terribly musical.

Still – it does remind me of shred videos, which are so funny I can hardly believe it.