RE: [UACCESS-L] Gesture control

["Robert Carnegie" <Robert.Carnegie@seemis.gov.uk>]

> Popular Science (5/27, Mone) reported on SixthSense, developed 
> by MIT grad student Pranav Mistry, which acts as a portable,
> gesture-controlled interface that could eventually "let people
> operate smartphones without touching a button, do instant
> research on objects around them, and generally offer the kind
> of enhanced-reality experience that's now confined to
> science fiction."

Any new interface technology sets out to offer an experience that's
Now confined to science fiction.  It's one reason to have science
fiction: to inspire technological advance.  There's that test
prototype space shuttle that they called "Enterprise".

Comments to the article are, "Whatever - I want it in video 
spectacles."

> Four different colors of tape are wrapped around the user's 
> thumbs and forefingers. A webcam captures video, including 
> specific hand signals that software in an accompanying laptop 
> tracks and interprets.  A mini-projector then displays the 
> relevant content - e-mail, stock charts, photos - on the nearest
> surface.

Real-time stock charts are still the killer app??  Friend, you 
do /not/ want to watch what happens to your life savings, as it
happens.

I suppose they can't tell us it's going to be pornography.
Once they program a fifth tape color.  Any new technology...

But wait.  My hands /have/ five digits.  What kind of
Mickey Mouse Invention is this??

(Looks at article pictures again, sees five fingers)

The projector is worn on the chest, for now.  So, do you 
remember in the Obama-McCain election, this one TV commentary 
team had a card onto which 3-D graphics were projected?  
Jon Stewart on _The Daily Show_ thought it was hilarious.  
He thought it was even more hilarious that they won a 
journalism award.  But, with the other stuff that /this/
thing does, it can probably recognise a blank card held up 
to project on... or of course you could use a handheld 
VGA display, such as are sold as digital "photo frames".
Likewise, where this device analyses projects the image of 
a watch onto your wrist, you could wear a watch.  But,
unlike those objects, /this/ solution doesn't work out of
doors in the daytime.

> Later this year, 

Why not now?

> Mistry will begin working with Samsung engineers to 
> compress the entire system into one of the company's new 
> smartphones, which has a built-in projector. With further 
> improvements to the algorithms, eventually even the markers
> and tape could go away and the device could track fingers
> alone.

Do we think they'll make more than one phone that does 
this?  I don't mean one model of phone.  I mean one phone.
Like when they show you a new electric car that retrieves
your stock charts and plays tracks from your iPod to suit
(this technology is called "Smash-Up", probably, and does 
Douglas Adams still have lawyers now that he's dead?), 
but they only made the one that you're looking at.  
Like Space Shuttle "Enterprise", kind' a.

Maybe voice and gesture recognition can be processed 
"in the cloud" instead of inside the smartphone itself. 
Has anyone offered that for voice, beyond dialling?  Maybe
the thing can give you a virtual watch just when you look 
at your wrist, doesn't that count as a gesture?  Or maybe
it does more than just a watch.  It can put your stock 
charts there.  I wonder what the gesture for that is?  
The one that I'm thinking of might be the gesture 
for the pornography.  And so could that one.  Mistry,
got a problem here, they're pretty similar actions...


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