Whole Body Interaction in Abstract Domains

Abstract

There is little dispute that Whole Body Interaction is a good fit of interaction style for some categories of application domain, such as the motion capture of gestures for computer games and virtual physical sports. This reflects the observation that in such applications the mapping between user gesture and the desired effect is, broadly speaking, the identity function. For more abstract application areas such as mathematics, programming and musical harmony, finding appropriate mappings between gesture and effect is less straightforward. The creation of appropriate whole body interaction designs for such abstract application areas remains challenging. However, this is not to argue that whole body interaction is unsuited to abstract domains. Indeed, there is evidence, outlined below, that whole body interaction offers excellent affordances for some highly abstract applications areas.