Need help choosing a research direction for UI field

Question

Hello all, This lot has proved EXTREMELY helpful in the past so I thought I would pose a question with a more open ended answer.

I am going to be starting my M.S. in Graphic Information Technology Thesis and I need a topic. I am a web designer and front-end developer working full time in that industry. My adviser prefers we bit off a piece of his research as our thesis, but it doesn't especially interest me. He has given me the go head to find my own topic. Ideally I would like to do something in the GUI field, I haven't had luck finding inspiration from existing articles in that field.

Do any of you guys have idea for a useful project that someone with my skill set would be apt to tackle?

Answer 1

Gesture based input, where a user can use hand, head, body gestures in front of a camera to control the operations of applications. This approach is not new, in fact there have been demonstrations of this since the late 1980's. But the goal of your research would be to develop the use of gestures for use in real world scenarios, such as word processing, excel, and the OS, rather than whimsical scenarios like controlling a drum machine or music synth.