Google has today announced the beta version of their new Gmail Motion product, billed as “A new way to communicate”. The basic point is that a webcam, now built into most laptops, can be used detect and analyse users’ gestures, and these can be used to control the Gmail program – so rendering obsolete the keyboard and mouse.

Thanks to The Church Mouse on Twitter for retweeting this announcement.

Will this product really revolutionise the world? Or will it prove as ephemeral as a mayfly in April, or as some previous Google announced products like Google Animal Translate? Maybe by tomorrow we will be able to give it a more serious evaluation.

Seriously, there is a real idea here. A webcam can surely be used to follow fingers and so replace a mouse or a trackpad, just as on a touch screen smartphone, although the resolution of current webcams may be insufficient. Decoding of more complex gestures, perhaps even of sign languages for the deaf, would surely be possible in principle. But in practice this may prove just as tricky as voice recognition. So I won’t be throwing away my keyboard and mouse just yet.