Gestural interfaces make touch screens look so ‘last year’

The gestural interface used by Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report was based on work by MIT Media Lab’s Hiroshi Ishii, who has already commercialized similar large-scale gestural interface systems. However, such systems comprise many expensive cameras or require the user to wear tracking devices on their fingers. To develop a similar yet cost effective gestural interface system that is within reach of many more people other researchers at MIT have instead been working to develop screens with embedded optical sensors to track the movement of the user’s fingers that could quickly make touch screens seem outdated.

Touch screens, like those found in iPhones, use capacitive sensing, where the touch of a finger disrupts the electrical connection between sensors which determine the location of the touch. Gestural interfaces use embedded optical sensors to track the movement of the user’s fingers so they don’t have to come into contact with the display.

Many have pegged gestural interfaces as the next big thing in computer interfaces, including Microsoft whose Project Natal uses a peripheral embedded with a small camera to capture gestural information. However, according to the MIT researchers, such systems are limited because the cameras are offset from the center of the screen and therefore don’t perform well at short distances, which limits their ability to provide a seamless transition from gestural to touch screen interactions. This can be overcome if the cameras are set far enough behind the screen, as they are in Microsoft’s SecondLight, but this makes the displays bulky and requires expensive hardware to render the screen alternately transparent and opaque.

“The goal with this is to be able to incorporate the gestural display into a thin LCD device” – like a mobile phone – “and to be able to do it without wearing gloves or anything like that,” says researcher Matthew Hirsch, a PhD candidate at the Media Lab says.

Hirsch, along with MIT Media Lab professors Ramesh Raskar and Henry Holtzman and visiting researcher Douglas Lanman, have instead been working on a project that uses embedded sensors to turn displays into giant lensless cameras that can recognize hand gestures.

Pinhole cameras solve the problem

Read more . . .

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Tags: computer interfaces, gestural interface, hiroshi ishii, interface system, interface systems, minority report, optical sensors, touch screens

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Communications, Innovation, gizmag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.