social species with all the nosiness that entails; we love to observe what others are up to, including what they are turning their attention toward. Try it out sometime: Stop in the street and just point. See how many people stop and look in the direction in which you are pointing.

Within the field of human-computer interaction, much of the research on pointing has been done in the context of remote collaboration and telematics. However, pointing has been grabbing my interest of late as a result of a flurry of recent conversations in which it was suggested that we are on the brink of a gestural revolution in HCI.

In human-device/application
interaction, deictic pointing estab-
lishes the identity and/or location
of an object within an application
domain. Pointing may be used in
conjunction with speech input,
but not necessarily. Pointing also
does not necessarily imply touch,
although touch-based gestural inter-
action is increasingly familiar to us
as we swipe, shake, slide, pinch, and
poke our way around our applica-
tions. Pointing can be a touchless,
directive gesture, in which what is
denoted is determined through the
use of cameras and/or sensors. Most
people’s first exposure to this kind
of touchless, gesture-based interac-
tion was when Tom Cruise swatted
information around by swiping his
arms through space in the 2002 film
Minority Report. However, while sci-
ence fiction interfaces often inspire
innovations in
technology—it
is well worth
watching presenta-
tions by Nathan Shedroff
and Chris Noessel [ 2] and
by Mark Coleran [ 3] on the
relationship between science fiction
and the design of nonfiction inter-
faces, devices, and systems—there
really wasn’t anything innovative in
the 2002 Minority Report cinematic
rendition of gesture-based interac-
tion, nor in John Underkoffler’s [ 4]
presentation of the nonfiction ver-
sion of it, g-speak, in a TED Talk in
2010 [ 5]. Thirty years before that
talk, Richard Bolt created the “Put
that there” system (demoed at the
1984 CHI conference). In 1983 Gary
Grimes at Bell Laboratories patented
the first glove that recognized ges-
tures, the Digital Data Entry Glove.
Pierre Wellner’s work in the early
1990s explored desktop-based, ges-
ture-based interaction, and Thomas
Zimmerman and colleagues used
gestures to identify objects in vir-
tual worlds using the VPL DataGlove
in the mid-1980s.

September + October 2011