What Are The Uses Of Gestures?

In today's society, there are two types of gestures. There are those used in conversation, including things like gesticulation and pointing, and there are those used to interact with technology.

1. You will find a lot of people use gestures in conversation to emphasize their points, and to aid description. There are many forms of gesture, each with different meanings. A lot of them are part of general body language and can convey emotions like anger and sadness, whilst others will simply help to move a conversation along or make things easier to understand, such as pointing to something or indicating something's size in order to better inform the person being spoken to. Some gestures, like the bow and the curtsy, are deeply seated in long running tradition and are gestures of formality and manners.
2. Modern technology is being designed to understand gestures as a way of inputting data. Apple's Magic Trackpad product, for example, can be used both as a normal mouse input for its line of Mac computers, and as a gesture input. Gestures on the Magic Trackpad can be anything from running two fingers up or down in order to scroll through a web page to four fingered swiping motions used to switch between applications or return to the desktop.

The use of gestures in technology is quickly spreading to other manufacturers and product classes, such as tablet computers and mobile phones. Another interesting example of gestures used in technology is Microsoft's Kinect sensor. It uses a special camera array to detect the users skeleton, and will recognize a number of movements as pre-programmed gestures used to control the computer or console it is connected to.