Those of you who are a bit tired of using your finger on usual glass touchscreens might be interested in this new project. Bruno Zamborlin’s Mogees or “mosaicing gestural surface” appears to be paving the way for a new touch interface technology for the future.

The idea is very simple – “real time gesture recognition with contact microphones”. By utilizing a contact microphone and complex audio processing software, Zamborlin and his team have showed that it is possible to determine the placement and direction of gestures on any surface, including a balloon.

Mogees receives input from the stethoscope-like contact microphone that you see above and analyzes it for recognizing gesture.

That contact microphone actually contains multiple microphones which will help to create a stereo image of the sounds it hears. The vibrations that are made with your fingers on a surface are analyzed and converted into gestures on a PC connected to the microphone via that black cable. These gestures are converted into sounds using MaxMSP, which is a visual programming language for creating music and other multimedia stuff.

The researchers haven’t given out any details regarding possible applications for Mogees. But it is always fun to imagine, right?

What if you could keep your handset in your pocket and you could just tap your leg to answer a call? Imagine scrolling down a webpage on your laptop by touching your finger on the table. Taking gestures off of the device and moving them into its vicinity seems to be a whole lot fun. Maybe all those will be part of our future.

Check out Bruno Zamborlin’s blog here and check out the video to know more about Morgees.

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The first model of Hisense Smart TV with this unique feature is Series XT710, which has been introduced to consumer markets in China to mark the October 1st National holidays. Users will enjoy a natural, new intuitive way of interacting with their TV sets. They will be able to control basic TV functions, without having to move out of their comfortable viewing position to reach the remote control. Users will also be able to play games using intuitive gestures and touchless use other applications on the device.

But how does all this work, your all too human neurons might be asking you. Well, these smart TVs will use motion monitoring cameras to read a persons hand and body gestures and in turn control various functions. Hisense will be making use of eyeSights SDK on their new XT710 smart TV, which makes use of 2D cameras to monitor hand gestures and movements. It’s back to the future, folks!

[UberGizmo via PR]

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While the Bluetooth headset has allowed people to look like they are talking to imaginary friends, a new device will let iPhone users get in on the action and look like they’re gesturing and talking to no one. A team of researchers at the Hasso-Plattner Institute in Germany have designed an interface that allows you to use apps on your iPhone and answer calls by tapping the palm of your hand.

During a study, the researchers found that iPhone owners could accurately determine the position of two-thirds of their apps on their palms without  looking at their device. They were able to recall the position of apps used more frequently with up to 80 percent accuracy. The interface takes advantage of the user’s muscle memory by using a bulky depth camera that tracks finger positions on the palm. The camera is mounted on a tripod, and software determines the actions the gestures would execute on an iPhone, before transmitting the commands to a physical phone via WiFi radio.

The interface would come in handy when you’re doing the dishes and are elbow deep in soapy water. Instead of trying to dry your hands and scrambling to answer the phone, you’d slide a finger across your palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an “imaginary phone” system that would relay the request to your actual phone.

Lack of visual feedback limits the imaginary phone, but it isn’t intended to completely replace your iPhone, just to make certain interactions more convenient. The researchers hope to eventually develop a smaller, wearable depth camera, but you’ll still need a special camera to follow you around just so you don’t have to take your iPhone out of your pocket.

What do you think? A useless discovery, or ideal for those situations when it’s inconvenient to directly answer your phone? Would you use it?

The post Clean Screens: Prototype Enables Touchless iPhone Hand Gesture Controls appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Aside from the OS compatibility issues, this won’t work on the current Apple iPad because it does not have a front-facing camera. The tech from eyeSight uses the built-in camera on Android tablets (and Windows-based portable computers) to track and recognize hand gestures from the user. Instead of actually swiping across the touchscreen, you can just wave your hand.

This may sound like a fun, but mostly useless application for most people, but think about this: what if you are in a lab of some kind and you have toxic materials on your gloves? You can’t go and smear that toxic ooze all over the touchscreen on your tablet, but you can wave your hands around like you just don’t care.

“Users can remotely control their music and video player, browse through eBooks, manage presentations, play games, control PC apps and carry out many other tasks without touching the keyboard or touchscreen,” said Gideon Shmuel, eyeSight’s CEO. “It is ideal for functions that do not require hands-on management and offers a new and improved user experience.”

Elliptic Labs has something seemingly similar, but that uses ultrasound rather than the built-in camera.

The post Touch-free gestures for tablet devices devised by eyeSight appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

This past September at the IFA Berlin trade show Elliptic Labs revealed their Touchless Gesture User Interface technology (video). It allowed a user to make hand movements (gestures), similar to Microsoft’s Kinect technology; giving the user the ability to control their device by simple hand movements. The company had been working on a prototype with a reference design tablet which has now evolved into a touchless dock prototype for the Apple iPad.

The technology used in the dock is ultrasound, it creates a “touchless zone” that covers approximately one foot in front and to the side of the iPads screen. We had a chance to catch up with CEO Stian Aldrin, who explained the following; “The idea is that you use touchless gestures to operate primary functions of a docked tablet in situations like when you have wet or greasy hands in the kitchen. In general tablets are made for being handheld. When it is docked you are often walking or standing further away, and then using a finger on the screen involves a change of modality. Rather than bending down, leaning forward or picking it up you can use larger movements a little bit further away to do things like volume up or next song without changing modality.”

This technology will be shown at CES next month.  While it does look like its designed just for the iPad, think again. The hardware and sensors are “off the shelf components” and to run the UI a simple App on the tablet will do; essentially giving the ability for any device to receive commands via touchless zone gesture user interface.

[Elliptic Labs]

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