Web design has come along way since Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web with Netscape and the desktop ruling the day. Today the hot new growth area is mobile devices and improved methods in web design/ User Interface (UI) are needed.

The Apple iOS and Google Android mobile operating systems have pioneered the way with touch UI to address the mobile market with great success. It would seem we’ve reached a pinnacle in this area with the release of Apple iOS 7, Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 and Google’s KitKat. However there are some very intriguing new developments on the horizon that should prove even more innovative.

Enter gesture recognition

Gesture recognition you might ask … what is that?  Something pretty cool in my humble opinion. You can see a basic example of this today with the new Samsung Galaxy S4.  The smartphone uses it’s front facing camera to detect the owner’s eyes and can stop a video play if the owner looks away. Also consider Microsoft’s xbox and Sony’s playstation where the user becomes the game controller.

The possibilities are very interesting, when you think about the uses for games, and for making the mobile devices safer to use while driving. Not to mention a better user interface for some of the more obscure touch features in use today.

Brushing up on Gesture Recognition

• A New Chip to Bring 3-D Gesture Control to Smartphones – MIT Technology Review
• 600 Million Smartphones Will Have Vision-Based Gesture Recognition Features in 2017 – ABI Research
• Gesture Recognition: The Next Big Thing for Smartphones after Touch? – PointGrab
• Gesture Controls can turn Anything With a Camera Hands-Free – PointGrab
• Fluid Motion aims to make gesture recognition tech more accessible – ZDNet

And if you need to brush up on the current touch UI:

• UIGestureRecognizer Tutorial in iOS 5: Pinches, Pans
• UIGestureRecognizer Class Reference from Apple’s iOS Developer’s Library