Controlling Your TVs, Tablets, Phones by Gesture

For general purpose computing, gesture recognition can work wonders for applications which usually have a fixed set of frequently used common tasks, such as presentations, e-books, media players, image albums and of course, on a broader scale, operating systems such as Windows 8.

Gesture recognition for the PC

The recently announced APUs from AMD, code-named `Richland' and `Temash', have built-in gesture control, powered by eyeSight. Since the gesture recognition semantics are now built into the processor, performance improvements may be expected compared to traditional CPUs.

"Gesture recognition is becoming an important feature to be included in digital devices. The integration of our solution into AMD's APUs brings this game -changing technology to the masses," said Gideon Shmuel, CEO, eyeSight.

However, it is true that the technology has been optimized specifically for AMDs APUs only, in order to bring about accuracy and efficiency into the gesture recognition process. "Working with AMD to bring gesture control to their 2013 APUs in this way is really significant. It validates growing consumer demand, and identifies gesture recognition as essential for digital devices, and pre-integration makes perfect sense. The Richland and Temash APUs carry out gesture operations that are usually more CPU-intensive with an extremely low impact on the processing load of the system, making for a smooth overall experience. AMD's solution will clearly be a very attractive option for any OEM looking to build a PC, laptop or tablet with gesture control functionality", adds Shmuel.

Intel too is ramping up it's plans. At CES 2013, Intel outlined a plan to accelerate new mobile device experiences across the company's growing portfolio of smartphone, tablet and ultra-book offerings. Kirk Skaugen, VP and General Manager of the PC Client Group at Intel said, "...we are set to deliver the biggest increase in battery efficiency in Intel's history with 4th generation Intel Core processors, while adding broad new human interfaces to computing devices through touch, voice, facial recognition, and gesture-based interactions...."

Intel has also come out with an SDK (which is in it's third beta as of the time of writing) for developing applications

based on perceptual computing. Capabilities offered in the SDK include close-range hand and finger tracking, speech recognition, face analysis and 2D/3D object tracking and the download is available from http://ld2.in/4hz . You can also order the camera for the SDK from the same page.

Gesture recognition for gaming

Gesture recognition in gaming allows you to almost literally get under the skin of the character you are playing. A efinitive change in the user experience was brought about by Microsoft's Kinect (earlier called Project Natal). Last year Microsoft had made available the free SDK for Kinect for Windows, so that developers can build applications based on Kinect. The possibilities are many, such as the already available Nike training game for workouts.

Among others, Nintendo too has a motion-sensingequipped controller which is used for gesture recognition in it's games, although it does mean that you need to use additional hardware which is needed to be kept in hand, unlike Kinect, where the body is left free to move at will.

How you can use it right away There are already available freeware tools which take the pain out of frequent mouse clicks by automatically registering a click on their own when they detect steady hovering of the cursor for a set period of time. owever,freely available technology has now gone beyond motion sensing, and can help people to use a PC without using any keyboard/mouse at all, which will greatly aid physically challenged people to use a computer. Remember Gmail's April fools' joke about gesturerecognition enabled Gmail (http://tinyurl.com/3nkcaea)?

Many fell for it. But, what if you could actually do something similar without kidding and without needing to buy additional hardware? There are open source free software solutions available for the purpose. For instance, there is Dasher, which, like the T9 predictive text input of the mobile phone, automatically tries to guess the next character in the word simply making use of mouse cursor movements and registers keypresses accordingly for you, without needing to speak/ click/type at all! Dasher can be used with Indian languages too, and can give a typing speed of up to 25 words per minute with practice. Dasher, along with the corresponding language files, can be downloaded for a variety of platforms (including Windows and some mobile devices too) from http://ld2.in/4gz .

Also useful and fun to use is Eviacam (short for Enable Viacam), which controls the mouse cursor movement as well as emulates all types of mouse clicks, including dragging, simply by monitoring your head movements through the webcam! In our tests, we found it to be extremely accurate even using a VGA webcam and easy-to-use both for novice users as well as for those who would like to have a finer degree of control over the sensitivity and host of other configuration options provided. Like Dasher, Eviacam too is free and open-source.

It is easy to imagine the combined possibility of these two applications: Just by making use of the webcam, you will be able to operate your PC without speaking/typing/ clicking, free of charge, while being able to customize the behavior as per your needs. Eviacam too works on a variety of platforms including Windows and can be downloaded from http://ld2.in/4h0