What is a gesture?
Gestures are intentional body movements designed to communicate with another person: a gesture may signal an intention, give a command, assist an explanation or express a feeling. Although we tend to think of hand movements in particular, gestures can include a shrug of the shoulders, kicking a stone or pulling a face. A limited range of gestures has been used to control computers for many years since graphical interfaces began to take over from the command line. Each movement of the mouse is a gesture, even though constrained to actions like point, click, drag and hover. These gestures are abstracted into the capabilities of the hardware and combined with onscreen cues (buttons, menus and the like) to produce a response from a given application. The entertainment industry is driving considerable development of gesture-based controls, in addition to the more specialised demands of military, medical and other customers. This article will give a range of examples, but there are many more
