If you’ve been having a lot of fun with your Wii and Xbox Kinect over the past several years, you may be wondering where all of this motion- and gesture-based control is leading us.  Wonder no more, because the movement of your own body or the sound of your own voice is the technological replacement to remote controls and other input devices, like keyboards and mice, for many consumer applications.

Sure, developers will hold on to their travel-sized fold-out QWERTY boards for at least a few years (decades, more likely), but that doesn’t mean that average consumers have to do the same.  Much like science fiction presented to us via Start Trek: The Next Generation in the 1980s and 1990s, interacting with your music, video, games, and even intergalactic hails, err, video calls is only a voice command away.

Thanks to Samsung, who is unveiling the first voice and motion controlled television (with facial recognition for logging in to web services to boot!), phrases such as, “TV channel 432”, “Radio volume up”, and “Computer search “’Italian recipies’” might all become the opening of common everyday conversations with computational devices in the future.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is already trying to convince us to speak to our Xbox consoles, Apple wants us to pester Siri about any trivial issue, and American car companies are clamoring over themselves to offer more voice activated radio, Internet, and telephone controls than their competitors in a desperate plea to use technology as a pseudo-apology  for decades of non-existent innovation.

So, if you thought getting used to seeing people talking to themselves while wearing Bluetooth headsets or hands-free systems in their vehicles, get used to seeing even stranger things.  People seemingly moving in interpretive gestures for no good reason will become common sight.  And next time you hear someone mumbling to themselves while walking down a busy hallway, it just might be that they are conducting a private web search rather than hushing their vocal rants over coworkers, traffic, and taxes.

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