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This page on oblong’s website explains how they shot the famous gesture interactions seen in Minority Report:

You adapt the gestural language from the Luminous Room work. You train the actors to use this language. They become adept, even though it is partly an exercise in mime. The production will shoot the actors performing gestural tasks in front of an enormous transparent screen, but the screen will be blank, a prop. Graphics will be composited onto the screen in post-production. You understand that for a sense of causality to emerge the actors must be able to clearly visualize the effects of their gestural work. You assemble a training video showing this.

So much for “natural interaction”… (check this other post as well)

Update (#1): Aurélien Tabard pointed me at this quote from Douglas Engelbart in Thierry Bardini’s Bootstrapping:

When interactive computing in the early 1970s was starting to get popular, and they [researchers from the AI community] start writing proposals to NSF and to DARPA, they said well, what we assume is that the computer ought to adapt to the human […]  and not require the human to change or learn anything. And that was just so just soantithetical to me. It’s sort of like making everything to look like a clay tablet so you don’t have to learn to use paper.

Update (#2): Thomas Baudel suggested this quote from Douglas Adams’s Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years, radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then, as the technology became more sophisticated, the controls were made touch sensitive … now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant you had to stay infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme.

This quote was actually in “CHARADE: Remote Control of Objects using Free-Hand Gestures”, a 1993 CACM paper written by Thomas and Michel Beaudouin-Lafon. The legend says that this work also served as inspiration for the Luminous Room…