I’m sure many of you have seen and heard the news about the latest breakthroughs in gesture-based computer input.  A company by the name of Oblong Industries, Inc., has created what they call "G-Speak" (http://oblong.com/).  Honestly, I can’t for the life of me understand the fervor.

So if you go to the website and watch the demo, it’s very cool.  Very cool, indeed.  But what are the practical uses of this?  Seriously, somebody please enlighten me.

Sure, I can see the utilitarian value in this as a study aid for alternative input methods.  Who knows what sorts of future use it will spawn?  But the website itself says, "starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles."

Okay, here’s my beef with this.  Let’s take this in turn.

My company just recently reduced everyone’s cubicles from 8′x8′ to 6′x6′ to gain space for more people.  In the g-speak demonstration, there appeared to be one guy (later two), in a room about 20′x30′, with huge screens along at least 2 walls and a sizable table in front of him.  The room was dark and he was standing.  I don’t know about any of you, but the 600 square foot room he was in is over 16 times the size of my cubicle.  When floorspace is at a premium, why would any company give (or pay for) their programming staff each 16 times more floorspace than they need? Furthermore, I didn’t see the guy in the demo type anything in.  He moved a lot of images and documents around.  Big whoop!  I can do that with pieces of paper on my desk.  How is g-speak supposed to help me write code?  And I don’t know about any of you, but work is tiring enough sitting for 8 hours a day… make me stand up for that same amount of time, and I will sue.  If I survive all that standing and waving my arms about.

Next… the living room, because couch potatoes apparently don’t want to sit still with a remote in their hands.  They’d rather, according to Oblong, stand up and act like a conductor to change the channel or skip to the next song.  Who would want or use this in their living room?  Honestly.

Conference rooms… because people who call meetings and conferences don’t have to worry about keeping their audience’s interest enough without them being all distracted by wild gestures and moving images on the walls.  Seriously, most people I know loathe meetings and think they’re a waste of time.  If I went into a meeting and the dude was waving his arms and moving things around the virtual room, I would leave the meeting with motion sickness and a strong sense that I’d missed the point of the meeting.

Finally… vehicles?  Seriously?  Because what we want is someone gesturing wildly in their cars to, what, change the radio station?  If I saw a dude in a car next to me in traffic gesturing like that, I would flip him off, cut him off, and then call the cops.  Or perhaps I would just pull over to the side of the road and cry until I was pretty sure the guy had made it to his destination and the roads were again safe for normal people to drive on.  Seriously, keep your hands at 10 and 2 (or 9 and 3 if you think your airbag might break your wrists) and don’t flail your arms about madly in your car, even if you are just trying to turn up your favorite song or adjust the A/C.

I guess the is all about how cool this type of computing interface was in "Minority Report" with Tom Cruise.  But seriously, how realistic was that?  Wouldn’t the star officer be in the field taking directions from the analysts back at the station?  Wouldn’t they also have several people pouring over the data?  And wouldn’t it just make more sense to have them in offices or cubicles with keyboards and mice, maybe a Waccom tablet or a 3-D pen?  Wouldn’t that get more accomplished and get Tom Cruise to the about-to-be-bad guys quicker?

To me, the reality is in the practical use for this sort of thing.  A lot of people wonder why we don’t have Star Trek-like computers that respond to our voices.  The reality is that a simple phone call is a nuisance in a cubicle farm; imagine everyone talking all the time just to check email, surf the web, write code, fill out forms and reports.  And surely, we don’t want our neighbors and bosses overhearing us saying, "red queen on black king… black four on red five… shoot the dwarf!"

So someone please chime in here and tell me what makes this so cool?  What possible practical use could we have for this?