I can hit the right arrow key on my keyboard hundreds of times a minute. Combined with a mousewheel for some spot checking and zooming, it only slows that down a hair.
I'm an amateur photographer and after a week of taking photos I have thousands of photos I need to vet. This kind of gesture-based interface would take me until the universe grows cold to go through a single week's worth of shots.
> Sure, even if a less-sophisticated computer user (such as a cop) might not.
I'm not sure how learning a set of rather specific gestures is less complicated to a novice user than hitting the right arrow key or the spacebar a bunch of times (or clicking on a button labeled "next photo"). I've tried to use gesture based systems a number of times in the past and have always ended up just turning that feature off, mostly because I couldn't remember which one of a dozen gestures meant the particular thing I wanted to do.
The idea is a nice one, use something that humans do all the time to build an intuitive interface, but the current state-of-the art doesn't understand normal human gestures very well. Why does two fingers vertically up mean "grab this" and not some other random gesture? In the end the problem is that we're trying to use arbitrary physical gestures, intended for a physical, 3-dimensional world, to interact with virtual objects in a 2-dimensional window, in ways that might not have any particular meaning to us as a form of normal gesturing (let alone cultural specific gestures, the number of different ways people do fairly universal gestures like point at something is mind-boggling).
I don't think that there isn't any value in this work, I just think that the application that these interfaces are currently being designed for simply don't make any sense.
Somebody else here mentioned that it might make a great deal of sense in 3d modeling sense mice-keyboard combinations are rather clumsy in that application. I happen to think using gestures as a control mechanism for robotics or machine operation might make more sense (imagine controlling a crane remotely by making appropriate hand open/close arm up/down gestures).