Slashdot Mirror
Wiimote Turns TV into Touchless MS Surface
RemyBR writes "User interface project allows you to control objects on a display using gestures, working like Microsoft's Surface but without touching the screen at all. Inspired by Johnny Chung Lee's work, the system requires you to wear Minority Report-style gloves equipped with infrared emitters on your fingertips. A Wiimote on top of the display keeps track of these IR LEDs, while the software can read the motion down to two-finger pinching gestures for image zooming."
Wow, slashdot editors are worthless. If you were my employees you would have been fired a long time ago.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/12/1714232&tid=222
If the video crashes at some point, a quick recap: it kinda works. You can see at certain points, the images get dropped and it looks like it doesn't totally track perfectly with where the fingers vs. screen are. However, it is an awesome technology and idea... maybe with a couple of remotes you could triangulate more precisely and get that true 'minority report' feel... just what i need for my tri-monitor setup :)
stuff |
My blog
An updated version of this video has been posted to the Cynergy Labs Site. http://labs.cynergysystems.com/
A better explanation of how he built this can be found here and a better video with a cool example of navigating a 3D object can be found at the Cynergy Labs site.
For my undergrad digital hardware project, I made one of these act as a Macintosh mouse. That was cool my professor let me get away with such an easy project.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove
You could have a very large vocabulary of gestures by using finger positions like modifier keys. Apparently, the native resolution of the Power Glove is 8 bit. This might not sound like much, but with a smoothing function like the one used for SmartNav head pointing devices, you can emulate much higher resolutions very well. (I got my girlfriend one of these because of her RSI, and I can tell you, it works very well, even though SmartNav's native resolution is only VGA.)
Please stop referring to any multi-touch device as being like the "Microsoft Surface". MS did not come up with the idea of a multi-touch display. They steal and buy 99+ % of their technologies. Let's get PC and stop giving credit where it isn't due. It is a "multi-touch" surface. Not an MS Surface. /rant
You can even do it with a regular webcam and some IR lights - check out the forums at http://nuigroup.com/ I recently built my own touch table from scratch - some IR lights point at a perspex surface, and an old projector back projects onto the perspex to provide a picture to interact with. The webcam has a small IR filter attached to the front, and this cuts out the regular lights. When my fingers touch the surface, they create hotspots that are tracked (known as Diffuse Illumination). You can also put the lights along the side of the perspex, and create a surface that uses FTIR (frustrated total internal reflection). So there are two ways of achieving similar results to Surface. If you are interested, check out nuigroup - everyone is very helpful if you run into any problems
Only when hacked. Besides, Nintendo is MS's rival in the console industry.