My partner calls them “pricey toys”. I call them the future. Check out my latest FTF post.

I know, right? Toys! You get one measely little iPad… sure, there was that other tablet… oh hey, remember that Annotate pen thingie I had!? Ahem, well they’re still the future.

Note: This post was originally posted onto Capella’s public blog: FreeThinkingFriday.com – The blog has been pulled from the public and given internal-access-only at meteor.capella-id.com

And you wont even need those dorky, three-finger gloves they used in Minority Report!

Gestures

Leap Motion brings affordable multi/3d gesturing to the rest of us (who don’t want to shell out for an MS Kinect – and then hack it).

Check out the vid on the homepage. Total hand (pencil, chopsticks – whatever) control. And for $70 bucks? Yep, I preordered mine.

Thought Control

On a related note: I’m very close to picking up an Emotiv EPOC headset.*
(*purchase is pending approval of my financial-advisor aka: spouse)

Forget gesturing with your hands (pencils, chopsticks – whatever), this device lets you use your thoughts and emotions to control your computer (well, the specific data those thoughts and emotions send to the 14 channel research-lab-quality EEG sensor array). This isn’t as out-of-the-box as the Leap Motion is – the headset and software require you “train” it to control your OS and other software – but the potential of uses for the physically disabled alone are stupendous.

There’s already FDA approved software controlled by this headset for motorized wheelchairs and an assistive typing app that allows people previously limited to Sip-and-Puff devices or using incredibly expensive eye-tracking word/array-lookup hardware and software to type as fast or faster than a touch-typist on a standard keyboard.

And yes, there’s tons of insanely cool stuff people are doing with this for the rest of us – do check out the vids on the home page of the site and Tan Le’s TED talk.

What this means for our media

Up until now, gestural interface design has been reserved for mobile devices and being able to keyboard through a piece has deemed it 508 compliant – but with the release of these two comercially viable and totally affordable devices – I can easily imagine we’ll soon be making sure our media is fully “gesturable” as well as 508-TC compliant (Thought Capacitive? Who knows what they’ll call it) .

I’m excited for the Leap Motion to (hopefully) ship in February and you can always make a donation to “Tessa’s EPOC Headset and Developer SDK Fund”* at my desk. ; )

*2014 update: I got an EPOC headset and an actual financial-advisor. Will post my thoughts on how these two devices compare and work together.