Gesture control isn't anything new, but it hasn't found its place like its cousin the touchscreen. A team of scientists at the Fraunhofer technical institute in Germany has developed a system that doesn't need you to wear gloves, and can detect multiple hands.
Detecting a body moving around like the Kinect does is one thing, but accurately tracking several moving fingers — let alone the fingers on several hands — and turning those movements into commands is something else entirely.
With the system being developed at Fraunhofer, it all happens in real-time. The system identifies the position of fingers and hands and, once it has them, is able to track them reliably. According to the folks at Fraunhofer, it's even more advanced than what we all saw in Minority Report, but then again Cruise was wearing gloves during that sceneand the system only used a few of his fingers. Sure, Fraunhofer's doesn't have the same flash, but that comes later.
A lot of laptops today actually already incorporate gesture controls using the webcam to pick up on signals. What separates this from that, though, is the accuracy of the system, as all your laptop could really do is pick up on waves and the like. You couldn't, for instance, be sitting on the couch an tell your Blu-ray play to pause with a specific hand gesture.
Via AlphaGalileo
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