Twitching your nose hasn’t meant much to anybody except dermatologists, Bewitched and third-base coaches, but things may be changing. Now brands may be able to incorporate gestures, big and small, to make the customer experience that much easier by make such movements trigger more important movements.
Gesture recognition, the act of a digital product using a person’s movements—but not haptic-like touch—to trigger a desired result such as swiping the air to control music on a car dashboard, is moving closer to the mainstream.
Facing the future
A swish of the foot to open a car trunk is commonplace. Now researchers are looking at how facial movements might be used as controllers.
While the world runs on smartphones, they aren’t always easy to pull out when something needs to get done. Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research (IGD) in Rostock, Germany, has identified facial gesture technology EarFieldSensing (EarFS) as one that has a lot of potential in this area, according to Phys.org.
IGD has been busy evaluating systems that track blinks, facial shifts and mouth movements. One takeaway from the consumer research—technology that was worn on one’s face was uncomfortable and socially unacceptable while tech that went into one’s ear worked well in the practical everyday world.
“The sensors cannot be interfered with by other movements of the body, such as vibrations during walking or external interferences,” Denys Matthies, scientist at the Fraunhofer IGD, observed. “To solve this problem, an additional reference electrode was applied to the earlobe which records the signals coming from outside.”
Auto Response
This kind of thinking has been tried before, though more often with actual physical gestures. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo and Volkswagen, to name a few, have all released a version of gesture controls, whether a foot-swipe activated car trunk or a hands-free control of music.
Apple and Samsung are racing to incorporate gesture control into their devices, while Thalmic Labs’ Myo armband lets you wirelessly control technology with gestures and motion:
Microsoft extends Kinect’s lead
Having pioneered making the human body a controller with Kinect, Microsoft is getting closer to introducing hand gesture-controlled technology across its products.
It just was granted a patent that will allow electrical devices to sense hand-directed motions. The patent encompasses products for its smart home, customer service, sports gears, automotive and gaming groups, among others.
That’s just the beginning. As Microsoft Research noted in a blog post about its plans for virtual touch controls,
The researchers behind Handpose say they have been surprised to find that a lack of haptics – or the sense of actually touching something – isn’t as big of a barrier as they thought when people test systems like theirs, which let people manipulate virtual objects with their hands.
That’s partly because of how they are designing the virtual world. For example, the researchers created virtual controls that are thin enough that you can touch your fingers together to get an experience of touching something hard. They also developed sensory experiences that allow people to push against something soft and pliant rather than hard and unforgiving, which appears to feel more authentic.
Microsoft Research on the language of gesture is a fascinating glimpse of a touch-free future:
“Let’s say you’re talking to a colleague over Skype and you’re ready to end the call. What if, instead of using your mouse or keyboard to click a button, you could simply make the movement of hanging up the phone?
Need to lock your computer screen quickly? What if, instead of scrambling to close windows and hit keyboard shortcuts, you simply reach out and mimic the gesture of turning a key in a lock?
Researchers and engineers in Microsoft’s Advanced Technologies Lab in Israel are investigating ways in which developers could create tools that would allow people to communicate with their computer utilizing the same kind of hand gestures they use in everyday life.
The goal of the research project, called Project Prague, would be to provide developers with basic hand gestures, such as the one that switches a computer off. And it also makes it easy for developers to create customized gestures for their own apps or other products, with very little additional programming or expertise.
The system, which utilizes machine learning to train systems to recognize motions, runs using a retail 3D camera.
“It’s a super easy experience for the developers and for the end user,” said Kfir Karmon, a principal engineering manager who is the project’s lead.
To build the system, the researchers recorded millions of hand images and then used that data set to train the technology to recognize every possible hand pose and motion.
Eyal Krupka, a principal applied researcher and head of the lab’s computer vision and machine learning research, said the technology then uses hundreds of micro artificial intelligence units, each analyzing a single aspect of the user’s hand, to accurately interpret each gesture.
The end result is a system that doesn’t just recognize a person’s hand, but also understands that person’s intent.
Adi Diamant, who directs the Advanced Technologies Lab, said that when people think about hand and gesture recognition, they often think about ways it can be used for gaming or entertainment. But he also sees great potential for using gesture for everyday work tasks, like designing and giving presentations, flipping through spreadsheets, editing e-mails and browsing the web.
People also could use them for more creative tasks, like creating art or making music.
Diamant said these types of experiences are only possible because of advances in fields including machine learning and computer vision, which have allowed his team to create a system that gives people a more natural way of interacting with technology.
“We chose a project that we knew was a tough challenge because we knew there was a huge demand for hand gesture.”
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