Yeah, Tom Cruise doesn't seem like the type of person to admit he would need to rest his arms.

What gave it away, the iron cross at the beginning of MI:2?

Not because he's allegedly fueled by the souls of aliens?

Oh, 100%. The interfaces in Minority Report were spectacular in terms of cinematic movie appeal.

Artistically it was a great choice, and they certainly weren't intending to inspire a bunch of wrong-thinking UI choices in the real world.

The dystopian future has a bustling physiotherapy and occupational therapy industry.

I can't speak for working in VR but I think us desk jockeys tend to underestimate what other people are doing for work. The lack of movement is what does thought workers in.

There are of course many jobs that are much more taxing on the body overall than waving one's hands at a Minority Report style computer interface. (I used to work at a restaurant! I've done actual work, I swear!)

However, waving your hands in the air for 8-10 hours a day feels a bit unnatural relative to "actual" physical work. I don't have a real scientific basis for this statement.

But there are some physics at play IMO. In boxing it's generally accepted that a missed punch consumes about twice as much energy as one that connects -- your body must do the work to accelerate your arm, and then it must do a roughly equal amount of work to decelerate it. I think there are some parallels to waving one's hands in the air for 40-50 hours per week relative to "actual" physical labor.

More to the point: MR-style interfaces (at least as typically implemented/depicted) don't really offer tangible advantages to using a good touch pad. They trade tiny finger movements on a trackpad for huge sweeping arm movements that accomplish the same things.

I think if MR-style interfaces had somehow been invented before mice and trackpads, we'd be celebrating mice and trackpads as absolute miracles of efficiency.

I actually prefer keyboard alone due to the concise control, I find mice pretty clumsy. But there are things that it can do that I can't achieve on a keyboard and same for VR, perhaps we'll end up with blended work stations.

On the note of tiring out, I have been strength training for 12ish years now and I still get tired quickly when holding my arms above my head to work on my car. I think because they are a smaller muscle group, they can be saturated easily. I don't have the same issue with repetitive motions, it's just holding the arm in a similar position that does it.

Maybe if AR gestures take into account full motions rather than holding the arm in a similar position for too long, it might not tire so easily.

I have VR already and I will say it's an exhausting experience in general, I can flat screen game for hours, but in VR I want out in less than an hour. I think it's the full focus it forces on you, and the split world spatial reasoning going on.

I’ve been on both sides of the coin in a role where I was on my feet 12 hours a day.

The aches and pains were there, but just in different spots. Yes my core was stronger, but holy hell were my feet exhausted.

You're talking like I didn't need to go to physiotherapy and occupational therapy to deal with my wrist issues and the lack of muscle tone in my glutes.

Same with all the scientists in movies writing on glass boards.

I distinctly remember they said they had hired scientists to discuss what the future would look like and I always thought "yeah, right, so in the future we got those holo interfaces and computers ultra connected but people in the same office still copy files from one computer to the other using some kind of plug able storage".

But now that I am also in the future I still use USB drive to move files at the office because. Guess they were on something after all :].

    The fallacies  

        The network is reliable;
        Latency is zero;
        Bandwidth is infinite;
        The network is secure;
        Topology doesn't change;
        There is one administrator;
        Transport cost is zero;
        The network is homogeneous.

I rarely use USB media, instead just copying things around using the network. But last week I needed to copy 200GB to my son's laptop, and ended up putting a 256GB SD card in the laptop and copying to it over night (it was started at 9pm anyway).

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of mag tape.