Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

But he does advocate a return to analogue (of sorts). He says it in the article. That touching things is better than not touching them.

Yes, but theres a whole world of difference between designing to stimulate the nerves in a finger tip and telling people to go back to using vinyl.

Plus the whole article is a big whinge that this technology is early in dev and not very good and has it's downsides. Yet he offers no solutions (though he does call it a rant, but that doesn't). I dunno. Haters gonna hate. I'm all for embracing new tech at it's infancy and encoraging it's use.

I'll admit he offers no solutions, but its advocating people push further rather than rest on an existing vision, one which we know people will be impressed by. He's not so much hating for the sake of it, but more trying to encourage a debate about what more we can do above what we already know we can. Its also worth noting that he's not the only one making this argument, a lot of people in the design industry aren't particularly impressed by the visions that he criticises, and like the BERG project I posted, people are currently experimenting with alternative visions for the future of product interaction.

Also - you mentioned about arm ache. Well going back to my point about human's ability to evolve and adapt, e.g. our generation has more flexible thumb joints than ever, due to us growing up playing computer games. This would be no different.

Good design should be tailored to a users ability, people shouldn't have to be forced to adapt to comfortably use a technology, and in the case of mid air gestures it would case definite discomfort to users (something that isn't necessarily part of the process in the case of thumb joints), and thats without considering what it would be like for less able users to use one of these interfaces.