Advisor Meeting: Brian Delevie

The coding was not going well. A complete failure on my Mac, the tricksy program code to integrate wii movements with the computer was proving reticent to work on even Paris’ desktop. My coding skills were getting much better (C sharp, if you must know) but it wasn’t just about tricky code – I was having recognition problems, I was losing tracking, I was sick of how exaggerated every movement had to be and how sometimes the points just… disappeared. Suddenly I was boged down in something I didn’t want to do without an escape – if there was no natural gesture interface for real possible right now, what in the world was I doing?

This is what I brought to Brian – a subject which I was really interested in but which involved no user-centered skills that I was actually looking to use in my job everyday. And was a heavy investment in skills that weren’t UX, strictly speaking …oh, and also I couldn’t get it to work anyhow.

So there was that.

I can’t tell you if he did this on purpose – and in fact I don’t remember how this happened at all – but Brian and I ended up sitting on a bench outside near the river. I don’t remember when I was last in the sun. Outside. With, like – birds and grass and snow and stuff. It was nice.

So Brian starts doing his Socratic thing and, exhausted, I stare up at the sky and answer as best I can.

Why are you dissatisfied with what’s out there? What are the limitations of what we have now? How will you use natural gestures? What are the demands of Media? Of Interfaces? What is ‘natural’? What is innate? What is intuitive? What is agency? What do we humans need?  

I don’t know how well I answered his questions – I never do, with Brian – but I got this dawning sense that the experience I was having with natural gesture interfaces wasn’t a glitch – it WAS what natural gestures were like. Glitchy. Unpredictable. Unrepeatable. Tiring. Random. Fussy.

Brian said something else which stuck with me, too: Is your return greater than your investment?  

 

Good question.