Bill Gates suggested in an interview with CNet that the Windows group is considering support for 3D gesture recognition.
Gestures would be 3D movements that could be sensed by special 3D depth sensing cameras. There are other ways to detect user movements, but 3D cameras are coming down in price and have improved sensing capabilities, so they are potentially going to lead this next wave of user interactivity.
Using 3D measurements in game play makes a lot of sense, so for this the XBox team has created Project Netal and is exploring ways of leveraging 3D gestures in its games.
However, the PC market offers a lot of opportunity too. As Bill Gates said in the interview, “I think the value is as great for if you’re in the home, as you want to manage your movies, music, home system type stuff, it’s very cool there. And I think there’s incredible value as we use that in the office connected to a Windows PC. So Microsoft research and the product groups have a lot going on there, because you can use the cost reduction that will take place over the years to say, why shouldn’t that be in most office environments.”
To me, Microsoft ought to be looking at 3D cameras and webcams in general as part of a goal of making computers more “aware” of their surroundings. I’ve seen small projects along these lines from various places–even Microsoft–but when you think about it, Windows should have an “awareness” component that could provide a combined view of let’s say all the computers or cameras in a home for auto-archiving of birthday parties or visits from relatives or that first step of a toddler or whatever.
Focused interaction and sensing like the 3D cameras provides is a good start. That’ll bring 3D gestures to PCs as Gates suggests. The real next step though will be to have a Windows component that can leverage this interaction more generically so PCs that are on can follow you as you prepare a recipe in the kitchen, provide auto-camera switching or editing from video feeds, and the like. That would be amazing.