As mentioned before applications, designed for natural interaction with the user, differ in many aspects from traditional GUI applications.
The advantages, resulting from the intuitive use of NUI-Apps, are not restricted only to the domestic or functional use in offices and conference rooms.
Thus, multi-touch applications are predestined to be used in self-service area. Simple GUI terminal, as they are often used at railway stations, airports, libraries, museums, exhibitions or fairs, could be replaced by multi-touch and multi-user interfaces. Even customers without computer knowledge would quickly learn to operate with the hands and fingers, because it hardly requires any skills to change the objects on the screen. The easy access to these systems increases the interest and increase satisfaction. In total, service-oriented services could be offered in a more efficient. way
Even the medical field could profit from the advantages of applications with a natural control-mechanism.
The Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto uses an application of body and gesture control for half a year.
In surgery these days, doctors rely during operation on images and other data of the patient. Often the doctors have to leave the sterile area to retrieve the data from a outside standing computer with keyboard and mouse. Before returning to the operating room the doctors again need to sanitize, which is a time consuming procedure.
By using a self-programmed program, which uses by Microsoft’s Kinect sensor to realize the gesture control, it is now possible for the surgeon, to retrieve informations on a monitor in the operating room, without leaving the sterile field or touch to have an input medium. Thus, operations can be performed more efficiently and the risk of infection by germs carried in is reduced.
But also in rehabilitation devices with natural input methods are becoming more common.
Thus in the rehabilitation clinic “Bavaria” in Bad Kissingen (Germany), the natural controls of Nintendo’s Wii game console is used for the rehabilitation of stroke patients.
Because the movements in the game are only performed of the virtual character if the user performs them physically they are animated, by playing a game, to make their regular exercises.
Sergeant Bryan Vallerie, Occupational Therapist ar “Landstuhl Regional Medical Center”, the largest U.S. military hospital outside the United States, made similar experiences with his patients.
The other tools normally used for physical therapy as rubber balls and marbles are for most soldiers not attractive enough to perform the rehabilitative exercises regularly, especially outside of therapy sessions.
By using the Nintendo Wii and games that require the movement of the patient, they could be motivated to make a their exercises on a regular basis. Even the, by the therapists desired, painful movements were made more often than in rehabilitation in the ordinary way. Through the games are addictive, according to Vallerie, the patients also were distracted from their pain very well, which brought an additional advantage, since the soldiers were inspired by repeating the prescribed exercises often.
Benefits of natural controllable Edutainment Applications
There are already many learning and edutainment applications for children and adolescents, however, however they always require that the user is able to deal with the computer already. The use of natural user interfaces, the training time in the control of computer programs is heavily reduced, as parallels drawn between acts of everyday life and interaction with virtual objects can be made. So even children without any computer knowledge very quickly with this type of application cope.
As opposed to traditional programs peripheral devices for input are no longer necessary, it is possible for multi-touch applications that multiple users, or even whole classes simultaneously work and cooperate on one device.
The joint active work on a topic also increases the degree of knowledge that keeps the students in the respective memory. Thus, the memory ratio of students increased from 70% to 90% because now everybody can contribute actively to the results.
Thanks to the modern and simple operation for children the fun and the motivation of learners are increased. So a varied form of knowledge is created in comparison to the usual chalk and talk.
Upcoming blog entries
Making The Game – Part 10: Game Design #1
Making The Game – Part 11: Game Design #2
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