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these types of systems are now making their way
into living rooms as household favourites as well
as being considered for more serious purposes
such as in simulations for medical education (e.g.
Gallo & de Pietro, 2009) and rehabilitation (de
Graaf, 2010). In many instances, gesture-based
interactions are combined with other input/output
mechanisms, for example, speech synthesizers
and speech recognition (Turunen, Hakilinen, et
al., 2009), gross motor movements (Hudson, Har-
rison, et al., 2010), or finer motor movements such
as bending or twisting the mobile device (Scott,
Brown & Molloy, 2009).
In the entertainment/gaming sphere Nintendo's
Wii began with motion controllers and gesture-
based interaction; it is now the market leader for
selling the console as a family entertainment unit.
Sony's new “Move”, motion controller for the
PlayStation 3 will use advanced motion sensors
and the PlayStation®Eye Camera to mimic every
movement on-screen. The PlayStation 3 monitors
where the controller is moving; it projects a user's
image onto the TV screen, and replaces the control-
ler on the image of the screen with the object it is
to mimic such as a sword or gun. The system is
considerably more sophisticated than Nintendo's
original version (Kien, 2010). Microsoft's Kinect
controller is designed for the Xbox360 console
that employs a camera and gesture recognition to
let players use their bodies to run, shoot or almost
anything else that their in-game avatars do. The
system contains a camera and a microphone with
sensors that can be mounted onto a television; it
recognizes facial expressions along with body mo-
tions and speech. This system is unique in that the
user does not need to hold a controller, enabling
them to concentrate entirely on mimicking the
actions of throwing, dancing, shooting, and so on.
These products are all scheduled to be released in
late fall 2010. However, despite strong reviews
none of them work quite as seamlessly as the
interfaces in the Hollywood films yet.
Uses for technologies involving gestures are
being explored in domains that, although using
a game metaphor, are devoted to other purposes.
De Graff (2010), for example, proposes applica-
tion of a Kinect-type device that could even be
used in a patient's home environment for physical
rehabilitation of patients with various injuries. The
mobile devices can be programmed to measure
performance via game scores, thereby introducing
a sense of competitiveness to the exercises and
encouraging the patient to keep going just a little
longer in any one session (Burke et al., 2009). The
sense of competitiveness need not involve other
players; the sheer joy of seeing improvements
via those indirect game scores could well act as
an important motivator, even when exercising in
isolation. In turn, this could shorten the duration
of rehabilitation as well as reducing the need for
physiotherapy, thereby saving resources as well
as helping people to get back to work faster or for
elderly folks to remain independent longer. Kien
(2010) explored using the gaming metaphor as a
learning tool where a learner would be immersed in
an environment by using the whole body to interact
while learning. One can imagine that this kind of
application could stimulate a sense of achievement
in children with academic learning disabilities
whose need to succeed is just as important as for
children without such disabilities. It could also be
used for children who are physically hyperactive,
perhaps with an attention deficit disorder who need
a healthy outlet for their surplus energy.
Another use of the Wiimote mobile device is in
virtual reality-enhanced diagnostic and therapeutic
medicine (Gallo & de Pietro, 2009). Following a
thorough analysis of the most frequently occurring
tasks in medical data inspection and an overview
of the major weaknesses of the Wiimote, Gallo and
de Pietro identified five necessary 3D interaction
techniques that could be implemented with that
technology. These were pointing, orientation,
translation, zooming, and cropping. Pointing en-
ables the user to select a precise point in a set of
visualized data; rotation enables users to visualize
the 3D object from all possible points of view;
translation refers to the ability to move the object
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