http://www.physorg.com/news141570427.html
http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/stories/2008/gesture_control/ (extra research)
About every household in America has a TV in it and it is seems to be a necessity in today's society. Well the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge has developed the technology control your home entertainment center and TV with just a wave of the hand. The way Toshiba TV works is when the viewer is in front of the display screen the TV will recognize the movement and then the control the display with the raise of a hand. “The gesture-control research is extremely exciting and is opening an array of possibilities for consumers, such as new interfaces for TVs and interactive displays in shop windows and information kiosks,” explains Professor Roberto Cipolla. Professor Cipolla and Dr Bjorn Stenger at Toshiba and Tom Woodley at the Department of Engineering have been working on the computer vision in human-machine interaction since 1992. The way the system works is there is single camera mounted on top of the display and is started with that wave of the hand. After that the software then tracks the person hand for certain cues and it will react to them. The system can even track movement in different lightning and rapid movement. Now the team is researching on how to deal with multiple users and how to track finer control. I think that this is a very cool invention and I think Americans will love it, but there are a couple things that I thought about that can hurt the system. What if some comes in the room and throw hands up, it could change the channel even if you do not want to change it then. Then if the person that can't use their hands, that is a downfall for them. But I also do not see the advantage of the hand control of the system; it might be the reason that it is just something new. If it comes into the market it might become popular but I do not think that it have too big of an impact on society.
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Hi Erik,
thanks for your interesting thoughts. You bring up a couple of questions that are indeed quite relevant in practice, e.g. false positives, multiple users etc. The chances of triggering the control accidentally by raising your arm is quite low. Currently the system is set so that you need to raise the hand for one second directed towards the camera, so that's something you don't normally do without intention.
The system is also not really designed to replace a remote, but to complement it, e.g. if your batteries are dead, you just want to quickly stop/mute the program or your remote is somewhere behind the sofa. Will this have a bigger impact? Well, it's always hard to predict if new technology will catch on. Anyway, gesture based input could play a larger part in applications such as public displays, adverts too.
Regards,
Bjorn
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