Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Gesture recognition for hands-free convenience

Gesture recognition for hands-free convenience

Gesture recognition has been a research curiosity for years, with a lot of admirable work languishing in the lab despite the seemingly obvious appeal of hands-free operation. Now PrimeSense Ltd.'s design win in Project Natal, which resulted in the Kinect hands-free controller for the Xbox 360, may have yielded the killer app the field needed. The accelerometer- and gyroscope-based Wii baton piqued the public's interest in more innovative user interfaces. 

But moving the recognition hardware into the console, leaving the user's hands free, is (pardon the pun) a game changer. The perceived success of hands-free interfaces like Kinect will motivate companies like Canesta (recently acquired by Microsoft), Hillcrest Labs and Movea to begin offering hands-free interfaces for such other platforms as TVs and notebook computers. In fact, the next best step might be the development of a standard lexicon of "gestures for control." 

Microsoft's Xbox Kinect controller puts the smarts in its camera and gessture recognition algorithms instead of in a complex handheld controller, leaving the user's hands free.

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