Pointing Device Gesture - Current Use

Current Use

As of 2005, most programs do not support gestures other than the drag operation. Each program that recognizes pointing device gestures does so in its own way, sometimes allowing for very short mouse movement distances to be recognized as gestures, and sometimes requiring very precise emulation of a certain movement pattern (e.g. circle). Some implementations allow users to customize these factors.

Some video games have used gestures. For example, in the Myth real-time tactics series, originally created by Bungie Software, players use them to order battlefield units to face in a desired direction. Another game using gestures is Lionhead's Black & White. The game Arx Fatalis uses mouse gestures for drawing runes in the air to cast spells. Several Nintendo Wii games take advantage of such a system. Ōkami uses a system similar to mouse gestures; the player can enter a drawing mode in which the shape they create (circle, lightning bolt, line, etc.) performs a function in the game such as creating a bomb or changing the time from night to day. Another example is Silver where basic mouse gestures actually map attack moves and such in real-time combat.

The Opera web browser has recognized gestures since version 5.10 (April 2001) but this feature was disabled by default. Opera browser also supports mouse chording which serves a similar function but doesn't necessitate mouse movement. The first browser that used advanced mouse gestures (in 2002) was Maxthon, in which a highly customizable interface allowed the assignment of almost every action to one of 52 mouse gestures and few mouse chords. Several mouse gesture extensions are also available for the Mozilla Firefox browser. These extensions use almost identical gestures as Opera.

Some tools provide mouse gestures support in any application for Microsoft Windows. K Desktop Environment 3 includes universal mouse gesture support since version 3.2.