Gesture Computing - Gaming with Color Gloves

Next time when you buy a laptop, order a pair of colorful gloves too. This is not to keep 'viruses' away. Just wear the gloves and play your game on the laptop. You may need no mouse or joystick hereafter. Have you seen the movie Minority Report? This innovation is akin to the "Minority Report Interface" where a high speed gestural user interface helped communication with a computer by hand gestures!

MIT researchers have developed a system that could make gestural interfaces much more practical. Aside from a standard webcam, like those found in many new computers, the system uses only a single piece of hardware: a multicolored Lycra glove that could be manufactured for about a dollar.

The glove is covered with 20 irregularly shaped patches that use 10 different colors. The system is being developed by Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory with his mentor Jovan Popovic, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

The most obvious application of the technology, Wang says, would be in video games: Gamers navigating a virtual world could pick up and wield objects simply by using hand gestures.Wang also imagines that engineers and designers could use the system to more easily and intuitively manipulate 3-D models of commercial products or large civic structures.

Wang's software crops out the glove background, reduces the resolution of the image to 40x40 pixels, searches through a database containing myriad 40-by-40 digital models of a hand clad in the distinctive glove, in a range of different positions. Once it's found a match, it simply looks up the corresponding hand position.

Since the system doesn't have to calculate the relative positions of the fingers, palm, and back of the hand on the fly, it's able to provide an answer in a fraction of a second.

Sources: Gesture-based computing on the cheap - With a multicolored glove and Youtube