The rush towards gesture-based interface seems to be a new trend, as shown by this gesture-control for regular TV designed by Australian engineers Dr Prashan Premaratne and Quang Nguye.
What seems to change here is the fact that the concurrency problem is taken into account: "Crucially for anyone with small children, pets or gesticulating family members, the software can distinguish between real commands and unintentional gestures". The good integration to a wide range of devices is also new (" elevision, video recorder, DVD player, hi-fi and digital set-top box"), acting as a universal remote control. In addition, the very basic gestural grammar designed here seems to be simple enough.
Why do I blog this? What is intriguing is the way it is referred to as "Wii-style". This type of system has received a lot of interested in the last 20 years, lots of patents have been filed in the area. Maybe the Minority-Report-like UI as well as the frenziness towards multi-touch interface has led to a situation where people are expecting this sort of things to happen soon (normative future shape by cultural artifacts). The arrival of the Wii that can be seen as the "Steve Jobs of gestural interface" is also an important milestone. Will this pervade multimedia system controllers? Time will tell and it would be good to understand what works and what's not working with the Wii in terms of users acceptances.