Imaginary Interfaces

The elephant in the room seems to me to be camera placement. Current smartphones probably already have good enough cameras, they probably can already run the software and within a few years they might also have the batteries required to keep such a sophisticated system running for longer periods of time.<p>But how do you get there to be a camera where you need it to be? Size isn’t even the problem, smartphones are already small and light enough. But are people supposed to cut a hole for the camera in their shirt pocket? Will we suddenly start to wear clothes with electronics in them? (The technology to make that happen already exists but we don’t seem to want to.)<p>This seems like a neat additional feature that would be pretty cool. If it wouldn’t add any extra hassle. It seems to me to be a very hard problem to get a camera to where you need it to be without adding any extra hassle for the user.

very interesting how making an L-shape with the left hand somehow makes the imaginary space more concrete in the user's mind. You can really see and understand that the user percieves the interface as existing, moreso than if they were interacting in an unframed way. In other words, I think the L-shape is key to grounding users, it gives a rudimentary starting shape to the interface.<p>Fasinating research, I'd love the opportunity to play with it. Obviously it's very early stages, but I wonder how long before we will realistically see stuff like this in production. 10 years? Sounds a lot but there's a lot of work to be done not only in terms of polishing the technology, but also in preparing the market for this kind of interface.

For consumer electronics, this seems like it could find very appropriate applications on minimal-UI devices like the iPod Shuffle.