[Sigia-l] mouse gestures

[Simon Wistow]

On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 06:33:11PM -0700, Richard Law said:
> Here's an interesting concept to consider.

A (slightly edited) excerpt from a post I sent to another mailing list
[0].  It's mostly in relation to games but it's still interesting ...

"Since I have a passing interest in games (*cough*) I was looking at
other control methods (in the course of work as well - writing games for
Java is difficult enoguh since you don't know what keys/input device
your player is going to have) and realised that a lot of games spend a
lot of time working on tje interface since an bad interface will
interrupt the suspension of disbelief or make playing the game harder
than it should be.

This would be disasterous - games have very little time to hook you
anyway - a bad interface on top of the normal difficulty curve means
that people just aren't going to play / enjoy / reccomend your gameand
won't buy the sequel :)

Black and White uses a gesture recognition system which is interesting
and is surprisingly effective and is a particularly good use of muscle
memory, doesn't clutter the screen with icons and allows a large range
of actions to be performed simply. The learning curve is steep though.

Some articles featuring the Gesture Recognition System :
http://www.gamespot.co.uk/stories/news/0,2160,2044582,00.html
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20010613/molyneux_01.htm 

A gesture recognition system is also used in Blender, a 3D modelling app
much like Lightwave or 3DS Max. It's Open Source and, from what I've
heard you either love the interface or hate it. A bit like Graffiti on
Palms I suppose.

/me peters off"


There's an Open Source/Free library that handles this sort of stuff 

   http://www.etla.net/libstroke/

hoepfully we'll start seeing gesture recognition as an experiment in
some Free apps (Mozilla has MozStroke already I think)

Simon

[0] http://www.thegestalt.org/scr/old/msg00071.html