On the Naturalness of Touchless: Putting the “Interaction” Back into NUI

After many decades of research, the ability to interact with technology through touchless gestures and sensed body movements is becoming an everyday reality.  The emergence of Microsoft Kinect, among a host of other related technologies, has had a profound effect on the collective imagination, inspiring and creating new interaction paradigms beyond traditional input mechanisms such as mouse and keyboard. Kinect and other technologies form part of the broader suite of innovations that have come to be characterised as Natural User Interfaces (NUI) (e.g. Widgor and Wixon, 2011, Norman, 2011).