Gesture-tech firm eyeSight allows you to control your TV with finger gestures
Now couch potatoes don't even need to use the remote control. Control your TV by moving your fingertip in the air.
Touching and swiping is almost second nature to us now thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and recently touchscreen-based laptops sporting Windows 8 OS. Israel-based eyeSight Technologies have come up with a fingertip tracking technology that does not require you to actually touch your screens. According to the company, this is the ‘world’s first commercial gesture technology allowing users to control digital devices with their fingertips, remotely’.
This technology enables you to control your devices from a distance purely on finger gestures. According to the company, this technology works with a range of devices including TVs, set-top boxes, computers and even digital advertising signages. The most basic requirement is the presence of a webcam, either present on the device or connected to it via a peripheral port. The screen in question does not necessarily need to be touch-sensitive. You move your finger in the air which is tracked by the webcam, and just as you would click on the mouse button, you replicate that gesture to get a response.
According to the eyeSight, the system works by using real-time image processing and machine vision algorithms which track the users hand-gestures and convert them into commands which the device will understand and ultimately interpret them.
As you can see in the video above, there isn’t much lag between the gesture and the response. How the response would be on a smaller screen is to be seen, although eyeSight CEO Gideon Shmuel says that the tracking capability is accurate to a millimetre resolution and it can be recognised over a distance of upto 5 metres.
According to eyeSight, software development kits (SDKs) for Windows, Android and Linux platforms have been released and it is working with various hardware vendors to implement this technology onboard devices such as TVs, tablets, etc. Eyesight’s fingertip-tracking technology can be embedded at the hardware or OS level by the manufacturer or developer.
Source: CNET