Interfaces that should feel right: Natural interaction with multimedia information

Abstract

Multimedia content, organization and availability influences the way we work, learn or spend our free time even more than we realize it: we share photos, play movies or listen to FM internet radio stations as ubiquitous activities. Multimedia information has literally invaded our lives: more and more resourceful computing equipments; continuously-growing internet on-line activity; inexpensive cameras and recording equipment at everyone's reach. With all these advances, interaction with multimedia information is still one step behind being restricted to the use of mouse and keyboard in the detriment of a more fluent and natural interaction. If we take a look at how our interactions look like in the real world we easily identify gestures as our every day means in order to interact with real objects, convey information or express emotions. Quite opposite, when it comes to computers and handling digital information we need to go back to the mouse and keyboard pair. The chapter addresses the problem of intuitive and natural interfaces for interacting with multimedia information. Gesture acquisition and recognition has been around for a while and many advances have been reported in what is today a very challenging research domain.Aside from successfully capturing and recognizing meaningful gesture commands, the real challenge starts when constructing gesture dictionaries, designing interaction metaphors and techniques that would feel "right" for a given application. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.