We have talked about the New Year & Technologies of the past decade, both passed & failed but no talk of past is complete without a mention of future. And if you would ask me one big revolution which can take place in this coming decade, I would not wait for even a second before saying, Gesturerecognition (The technology of using your body gestures to communicate with computing devices.)

Ever encountered a situation where you need to operate your Laptop or palm device while your hands are sticky with pizza cheese or sandwich mayonnaise. It happens most of the time with me. A big foddie I am. What if the PC understands your gestures? Microsoft has already introduced gesture recognition to gaming, and plans to take it to the personal computer as well.

At a recent engineering conference, engineers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) showed a new system that would let computers recognize hand gestures. According to the engineers, the protoypes are simpler and easier to manufacture. It consists of an LCD screen that could sense what your hand is doing. This means you can drag windows across the screen by pointing at them and moving the fingers. You could also rotate 3D objects using your hand. You could also provide an extra dimension to your inputs: you can move your fingers in three dimensions away from the screen.

There are various methods being developed to achieve Gesture Recognition. Many use a camera with wearable tracking tags on the fingertips. Camera scans the tags to catch the exact location of the tags & make sense out of the gesture just captured. This Method was made famous by Pranav Mistry of MIT.

The other methods consist of using a camera on the LCD screen or behind the screen. The LCD screen rapidly alternates between stages when it is opaque and transparent to light, but this happens so quickly — in one 30th of a second — that the viewer does not notice it. But the sensors get enough time to capture the light. Each sensor gets a slightly different image because of the angle differences, and the final image is put together through computation.

There are several gesture-recognition system prototypes being developed around the world, but many of them are expensive and do not lend themselves to easy commercialization. Microsoft Research’s office in Cambridge is also working on a gesture recognition prototype called SecondLight. This prototype uses a camera behind the screen. We do not quite know when this technology will be commercialised.

The day is not far away when we would use three kinds of inputs to the computer: keyboard, touch and gesture. One day, within a decade, gesture could become the primary way of interacting with a PC.

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