Yesterday we have the Microsoft Research Centre for Social Natural User Interfaces. This is a joint research centre between the University of Melbourne and Microsoft Research, in partnership with the state government of Victoria and Microsoft Australia. The centre will explore applications of Natural User Interfaces—better known as NUI—in social situations. It is the world’s first joint research centre dedicated to studying and perfecting the social applications of NUI.
There’s some amazing work going on with new ways of interacting with technology across the world, and especially in the world of gaming, where things like Kinect have enable interaction through gestures, voice and whole-body movement. There’s some great examples of non-gaming uses on the Kinect for Windows gallery, like the example below of turning any surface into an interactive whiteboard.
You can read more about the Research Centre announcement on the Microsoft Research Connections blog