INTERFACES change, processors come and go, but the keyboard and its trusty sidekick the mouse have been part of the PC for at least 30 years. They may now be about to get stern competition, thanks to two gesture-sensing technologies set to drastically reduce the amount of typing and clicking needed to control the average computer.
By tracking hand movements precisely, the wrist-mounted prototype of the Digits project, built by a team from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, allows gestures to be communicated in real time to any connected device.
An array of LEDs mounted on a plastic wrist brace facing the palm bounce infrared light off the user鈥檚 fingers. A laser shines across the hand to highlight the orientation of the fingers. A camera then reads the reflections, and software builds a model of the moving hand that is accurate to within one hundredth of a centimetre.
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Project leader David Kim says that Digits was born of the desire for a technology more accurate than the company鈥檚 Xbox Kinect gaming sensor. The aim was to track movement without tying the user to any particular device. 鈥淲e had to use technologies that are small and use less power,鈥� he says. 鈥淚t shouldn鈥檛 interfere with daily activity, and we wanted to enable continuous interaction.鈥�
All in the wrist
The device is about the size of two ping pong balls taped together, and currently needs to be tethered to a laptop computer. But Kim plans to shrink it to the size of a wristwatch and make it wireless. In a demonstration today at in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the system was shown controlling video games, smartphones and computers.
The Digits system isn鈥檛 the first such device. The Leap Motion sensor, from a San Francisco-based company of the same name, sits on a desktop reading a number of different gestures as users wave their hands overhead. The company has not yet released details on how the sensor works.
Digits is a 鈥渞eally nice piece of work鈥�, says Thad Starner at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who is also technical lead on Google鈥檚 Project Glass.
Digits is in its early stages, says Starner, who has been using a wearable computer for almost 20 years. Nonetheless, he is excited at the potential for pairing sensitive, precise control interfaces with heads-up displays like Google Glass 鈥� which looks like a pair of glasses without lenses, and allows users to see data without needing to turn their head 鈥� or his own bespoke rig.
Symbiosis of man and machine
鈥淵ou can imagine using really subtle gestures,鈥� he says. 鈥淚鈥檇 use it in class to pull up notes while I鈥檓 teaching.鈥� Starner鈥檚 own device feeds information to a display in front of his left eye. During a phone interview with New 杏吧原创, speech-recognition software listening in on the conversation pulled up emails he had exchanged with the magazine in the past. Later, the system pushed on rapid interactions with electronic devices into his field of view, deeming it relevant to the discussion.
Starner says the real power of Digits will be in continuous recognition 鈥� the ability to not only identify standalone commands, such as pressing your thumb and index finger together to skip a track on your iPod 鈥� but to interpret hand movements in sequence. Some of his current work involves teaching American Sign Language to children with hearing difficulties using a video game. 鈥淚f we had finger-tracking wristwatches they could put on and play the game, we could look at how their fingers move through time, and give them feedback,鈥� he says. 鈥淭hat would be really beneficial.鈥�
Adding wearable computing to the arsenal of human-computer interfaces represents 鈥渁 symbiosis of man and machine that we haven鈥檛 seen before鈥�, Starner says. 鈥淗aving access to data on a split-second basis makes you more powerful, more in control of your life. This is going to get us to the stage where we use systems without thinking.鈥�
