Data Glove That Turns Gestures Into Commands

ravidew writes: "Three students at Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center, University of California, have built a motion-sensing glove that can transmit hand gestures to a PC. Within 3 years they hope to build sensors that are no bigger than 1mm and can be glued to each fingernail. Now you can really tell Windows what you think ..." While you're at the Sensor and Actuator Center, check out Kris Pister's smart dust.

Comments

thjis was a damn Dilbert Cartoon!!!

[TheQuantumShift]

where the point was made that you might not want your pc to know where you hands are at all time... Dave, about last night...

Oh dear god...

[nurightshu]

Am I the only one who remembers where this will go? Check Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and remember -- in the future, you'll have to sit reeeeeaaaaally still to keep your PC from reformatting itself.

While scratching my butt..

[Guillaume Ross]

fdisk deleted my ext2 partition! crap!

Re:While scratching my butt..

[istartedi]

That reminds me of the one about voice recognition. A sales rep is in the middle of doing a presentation for such a system when somebody in the audience stands up and shouts "FORMAT SEE COLON" and then another guy stands up and yells "YES RETURN".

And yes, the moderators are humor impaired.

Dismissing pop-ups

[wowbagger]

Of course, the gesture command for dismissing annoying pop-up ads should be obvious, depending upon whether you are using LOCALE=en_US or LOCALE=en_UK.

Finger nail....

[BLAG-blast]

I hope they are cheap, I keep hit my finger with a hammer (miss use of screws and nails normally). But I can't imagine hammering a silicon chip into your finger nail would be fun...

But, they would have to be cheap anyway, since fingers nails grow and move and chips which didn't get damaged would fall off.

Of course a whole cyberborg army is no match for a couple of really powerful magnets....

I'm not getting the chip.....

applications for lonely computer professionals

[mike_the_kid]

What you need is a way to program the glove to recognize certain rythmic motions and to interpret that as writing code. Back and forth, side to side, whatever, it would have to conform to certain preferences of the user. These motions are then interpreted and translated into functions and subroutines for whatever application you are writing.

"Few, I am exhausted. I just pulled off 10 lines of code!"

"I just do not have any more code in me for today..."

Now you can get back to your own sick mind.

Give Windows the finger... literally?

[bahtama]

Gives new meaning to the "three fingered salute!"

Haiku

[575]

The blue screen of death,
My middle finger extends:
Control-Alt-Delete

Unlimited commercial potential

[Greyfox]

A commercial company could come up with a plug in which takes your gesture data and analyzes it for certain well defined movements. Think about it:

If:

The crotch-scratching motion is detected on a regular basis, you might get more pop-up ads for Gold Bond Medicated Powder.

Likewise, another common motion among those who sit all day might put some Preparation H commercials in your future.

Your typical 13-year-old might get more porn adverts, 'tis true...

The common nose-picking gestures might queue some Kleenex adverts up for your viewing.

Yes indeed, we should all sign up for this technology as there is no doubt that it will improve our lives beyond measure.

Smart liquid...

[hoggoth]

Forget smart dust, I want smart liquid!

I want to be able to DRINK an upgrade and have it interface with me directly. A pint of CPUs on the house! That way I can drink and actually get SMARTER instead of the current opposite result.

This could make EMACS usable!

[Squeeze Truck]

Just assign different "hand positions" to all the meta-keys the editor uses. i.e.:

palms-down = normal
palms-45-degrees = ctrl
palms-sideways = alt
palms-up (yikes) = meta (or whatever)
etc.
and "type" normally.

And for vi, just turn your wrists sideways a bit to enter "edit mode."

Never mind, this is a stupid idea.