Mobile VR will drive up gesture and motion control technology
Gesture and motion control will become vital for certain forms of human-computer interaction in the coming years, a new report from Juniper Research claims.
Juniper forecasts 128 million gesture and motion control devices by the end of 2016, rising to 492 million by 2020 led by companies like Leap Motion and Thalmic Labs.
According to the report, smartphone-based virtual reality technology (Mobile VR) will also be particularly important in driving up the usage.
“VR and wearables have shown the way that gesture and haptics can provide fresh ways to interact with technology,” said research author James Moar in a written statement. “The game changer for other platforms will be when technology firms are brave enough to reinvent their UIs to incorporate gesture and motion control, rather than considering it an optional add-on.”
- Juniper expects nearly 50% of all wearables and almost all VR to use the technology by 2021.
- For more established platforms like PCs and smartphones, Juniper believes that usage will remain low, with less than 5% of such devices using gesture control by that time.
- The arrival of motion control for smartphone VR in 2017 will start a shift towards multimodal computing, using both peripherals and motion and gesture control.
- However, at the moment this will simply extend current functionalities, holding back adoption across devices as a whole, unless the user interface paradigm changes.
For more information, the whitepaper ‘Gesture & Motion Control ~ The Wave of the Future,’ is available to download from the Juniper website.
