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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

This makes me realize that the gestures it is being demonstrated with are going to be hilarious if they are misidentified. I'm /assuming/ that the thing will not pick up gestures between you and someone else. Such that if I pick up a paper with a similar hand shape as their "pinch and move things" gesture, it will realize it wasn't the same.

Or will this be akin to how siri does a shit job understanding anything that is not mechanical in speech? Will be absolutely hilarious if it has a hard time recognizing non-light skinned hands for the gestures. Really hope they don't make that mistake.

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Hopefully the troubles with Siri are understood enough in Apple that they won’t make that mistake, because Siri is truly awful on my HomePods for thinking I’m talking to Siri when I’m not.

Thankfully many of the people in the demo videos were people of colour, so I’m fairly confident Apple has gotten that bit right and hopefully their gesture detecting cameras have IR or dot-pattern emitters to work in the dark as well.

I would cite the growing unease in Siri as evidence that they almost certainly don't have this done well.

IR dot-patterns will be its own problem. And I hope you never want to curl up on that couch to watch a movie with a blanket. :D

That said, I am certainly not trying to say they definitely got it wrong. I share high hopes that this will work. Not enough that I will be an early adopter, though.

> IR dot-patterns will be its own problem. And I hope you never want to curl up on that couch to watch a movie with a blanket. :D

Speaking of which, notice how nobody who was relying on finger gestures (rather than a keyboard) was using menus, or doing anything mouse-like. Just scrolling and clicking.

You point to things by looking at it, which is very precise according to people who have tried it, like MKBHD. Clicking and dragging is done by finger pinching. So it works quite similar to a touchscreen or a mouse.

That mechanic is available in some games on the PS5. Works decently well, but nowhere near as well as the controller pointing does.

Yes apparently it is surprisingly precise. There might be an uncanny valley when the system is perhaps a little too good at predicting what your next move is. Are the goggles monitoring your facial expressions, looking not just for eye movement but also wrinkled noses, scrunched-up foreheads, etc. ? Will it be able to function as (for example) a lie detector ?

I refer of course to https://twitter.com/sterlingcrispin/status/16657924229144535...

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