When Microsoft demoed Project Natal exactly 8 months ago today, it was heralded as being the most advanced way to interact wih video games. Just move your body, and a camera picks up all your movements. Simple. Shrink that down a little and you have “BurgerFace”, a game for Nokia’s Maemo 5 powered N900 that uses face detection to map your head to an avatar on your screen. The goal: eat as many burgers as possible, dodge the knives.
Apple has already filed a patent for gesture control using a forward facing camera, so how long until we see this type of behavior become common place? Touch screen devices are selling fantastically, but there are plenty of people who still want buttons. Is this a nice compromise for those folks?
I can only imagine what trying to use face detection software would be like on a crowded bus, tram or subway. Some teenager who just got a new phone is bobbing and weaving, hitting strangers, giggling at some silly photo blur effect applied to his face, all the while us cranky old people are sitting in the front, counting the number of stops we have left before we can escape this preview of what hell will look like.
[Via: Pestaola.gr]