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A No-Touching 3D Computer Interface
Justin Schunick points out a video demonstration of a 3D input system which senses the user's hand position, but without requiring the user to touch a controller or wear a trackable position indicator. From the provided description: "Utilizing the theory of electrostatics, we have designed a low-cost human-computer interface device that has the ability to track the position of a user's hand in three dimensions. Physical contact is not required and the user does not need to hold a controller or attach markers to their body. To control the device, the user simply waves their hand above it in the air."
Why? a little counter-intuitive, my tablet can do that much better.
I think it's an awesome idea, but poorly executed examples.
"...the user simply waves their hand above it in the air..." These are not the droids you're looking for.
Look Ma, no physical contact!
... then maybe a no-touch interface is not going to work well for me. I found the Theremin to be almost impossible to play because there was no way to get my hand in exactly the same x-y-z coordinate and with the same roll-yaw-pitch attitude (all of which affected the frequency of the oscillator). YMMV, of course.
Now we're going to have even worse contortions from the morons on the DDR games in the arcades. I can't believe these insensitive clods!
Government's view of the economy: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving,regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.
Interesting from a tech, nerd perspective I suppose. However, a web cam and a computer vision gesture control app can produce the same effect much more efficiently.
Couple this technology with 3-D glasses and a large monitor or three and you could really start getting immersed in your video games. Maybe I could map certain hand-movements to specific hotkeys in WoW and imitate my shaman stormstriking or earth-shocking.
Home-made VR, anyone?
... by waving his hands.
Your arms are going to get tired very quickly using this interface... Maybe we should rather work on perfecting those mind control interfaces.
A picture is worth exactly 1024 words.
This reminds of when Marty went to the Future to the Cafe 80's and the kids when finding out the Wild Gunman required use of their hands said it was like a babies game.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
"Physical contact is not required and the user does not need to hold a controller or attach markers to their body."
SOMEONE has forgotten the fact that porn has been the source and promoter of about every successful web tech to date.
-Styopa
From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Great now get it to toggle trough images with an up and down movement of the hand. "Hands-Free" porn browsing.
A lot of these technologies are really waiting more for computing power to increase to a level where it can support it comfortable, more then new ideas on how to get it to work.
We know how to take 2 camera and generate a 3d model of what the cameras see. The problem is processing speed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just needed to turn down the sensitivity a little... like people who put their mouse on super slow tracking vs. those who prefer a quick twitch approach. Personally I'd like a trackpad replacement with this interface, I don't want to have to move my whole arm around. Make it plenty sensitive or rather make the sensor's grid scaled appropriately for the size of the input.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Except with electrostatics instead of heterodyning?
I don't know about everyone else, but holding my hands anywhere in free space takes quite a bit of energy unless they are hanging at my sides. The reason the keyboard and mouse or other touch surfaces work well is because they allow a person to rest their limbs in an unnatural position.
So I am not sure about anything that doesn't allow a person to rest... it'd be like using a whiteboard all day long, and that is quite tiring!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Do we really want our PC to know where our hand is at all times?
This exact thing was done by Josh Smith at MIT in the 90s (see Geocities era page here ). His work was commercialized by Motorolla in their e-field sensing chip.
If I were using this on a desktop, I wouldn't mind wearing a small button on my hand to allow me to click easier (squeezing your thumb and index finger is less effort than moving your whole arm forward) and maybe have a small brace to rest my wrist on, one that gimbals around, to save my arm from being tired.
If it could be made simpler and integrated with mobile devices I could see it begin a winner though. Tiny mice and track pads are horrible, Touch screens have always been my prefered mobile input device and one that lets me use the computer with my fingers without smudging the screen would make me happy :D
Do I sense a Theramin app for the iPhone 5G?
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
In Soviet Russia, interface touches you!
Who else read this headline and immediately thought of Arrested Development?
"No touching!"
Theremin
Taelon shuttle
I can use my comp without touching it-
No touching it!
No touching it!
I can use my comp without touching it-
No touching it!
No touching it!
Look at me, look at me, hands in the air like its good to be alive
And I'm a dumb script kiddie, exploiting flaws in your security!
I can use you as another spambot,
I can make you my new zombie!
All of this with a flick of my wrist in the airspace over my PC!
From the comments above, none of the posers have had to swing a framing hammer for 8 hours a day for six days at a time.
Not using it because your arm might get tired? Talk about lazy.
Though I do like the idea of having the mouse clicker on the thumb and forefinger as suggested by one of the other posters.
Please don't bring back the U-Force! It was the only peripheral worse than the Power Glove. Why don't you stay dead you bastard input device?
Theremin plays YOU!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Man, this could be sweet. I for one cringe every time a colleague of mine comes to my office and touches my LCD screen to show me something. I really do. And when they leave, I pick up a towel to wipe it until I'm sure there's no trace left.
Yeah, I guess I'm weird...
The master said it first:
Most people here don't realise that your arms don't get tired after 5 minutes of using this. If your arms DO get tired, don't blame the interface on your pathetic physical nature.
Secondly, since when is someone going to be using this non-stop for 12 hours? A lot of people here again, incorrectly, assume one will be using this machine for prolonged periods of time.
I'm at work so I can't view the video, but I found something that might be similar that you can do yourself (if you have soldering/wiring/programming experience)
http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-3D-Controller/
Pretty cool stuff.
That's no moon...
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Amazing.
Theramins suk.
Make this a finger gesture interface. Your wrist is resting, and your fingers can do stuff fairly repeatable.
(Reboot from BSOD = That Gesture.)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What nasty action = rightclick?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
First I want to see what is actually under the cloth, second I want to know if he is just using a multiple pickup therimin, one for each axis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theremin
The only thing that affects the frequency of the oscillator is the distance of your hand - any part of your hand - from the antenna.
Don't think x-y-z; think polar coordinates!
I vote for that one to be controlled by a single extended finger. now, which finger to choose...
I think I would hate this possibly even more than touch screens (if that's possible). What's wrong with having buttons? Am I the only one who enjoys the feedback of a good clicky button?
Sneeze and you reformat the harddrive
tactile feedback.
Actually, I think a full-blown sign-language would be great, especially for use with cell phone cameras. There are a few obvious benefits, and some not-so-obvious ones:
(1) people learn international sign language, and it assists in international communication.
(2) The speed of data entry would be increased greatly.
(3) It seems to me probable that there would be decreased cost and possibly (if it was done by a designed/dedicated chip) decreased battery usage by using sign lanugage instead of other means
(4) Logon would be simplified, with simply flashing a thumbprint.
How to do it? I suspect that the way to do it might be as follows:
(1) take an image, and subtract one image's RGB map from the previous image.
(2) Run an FFT on the result, to get a motion map.
(3) Track the motion of the various blocks of pixels.
(4) From the motion of the various blocks, and moreover from what remains invariant and what adds on on one side (or disappears from the other), obtain a 3-D map of various objects. From the 3-D map, and how it morphs, obtain approximate rotation vectors.
(5) Recognize hands by the digit lengths and connection combinations.
(6) Plot the hand digit rotational and bending angles into a real-time motion map.
(7) Translate #6 into specific signs, which in turn can be programmed to be equivalent to international sign language.
The above method would also allow very high levels of compression of video.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Furthermore, there's a lack of precision. A useable touch-free interface must recognize hand gestures, even if just a state toggle ("active/inactive") and a binary command ("mouseup/mousedown") if not for a whole range of gestural commands. This appears to just detect limb position, which will inevitably lead to the kind of HHGTTG situations earning scads of +1 Funny mods ITT.
I can see the fnords!
(1) people learn international sign language, and it assists in international communication.
I'm a Hungarian, living in the UK, posting on an American website. Don't tell me about international communication.
(2) The speed of data entry would be increased greatly.
Compared to a touchscreen, maybe. Assuming of course the software can translate SL into your native language. Compared to a keyboard, this is a joke. Try coding C in sign language, and report back when they let you out from the mental institute.
(3) It seems to me probable that there would be decreased cost and possibly (if it was done by a designed/dedicated chip) decreased battery usage by using sign lanugage instead of other means
You mean a high quality (especially considering #4) camera and a custom-designed and -manufactured chip or recognition software with the associated CPU load vs. a $10 keyboard?
(4) Logon would be simplified, with simply flashing a thumbprint.
Fingerprint is not a secret. Repeat that until it sinks in. (They use it to catch criminals because we leave them all over the place, you know.)
Theremin not Theramin ... :/
I think this is an amazing project, especially for college seniors. Remember it's only a proof of concept, I'm sure it can be made smaller and more aesthetically pleasing.
I was looking at this as a replacement for WAY more expensive systems like OptiTrack or the Flock of Birds. It's a bit limited in that it does not seem to let you "point" at a certain things...the video looked like it created a "bump" roughly where your hand is.
I wonder if you could refine such a system using electrostatic sensors alone to resolve individual fingers and hand orientation.
With some refinement and augmentation from a single camera, it could turn into a gesture recognition system for VR or a video game interface much better than the Wii. Of course, it still doesn't solve the head tracking problem... [Perhaps full-human body tracking with a bunch of these sensors behind a 3D projection screen?]
Or you could take a look at MPEG7
This is the kind of stuff it was designed to do
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
George Bluth Sr. sure could have used one of these in prison.
No-Touching 3D Interface...
That's just like my girlfriend when she's pissed at me...
Theremins are analog devices with a rather high unstability, AFAIK, so playing on them are somewhat avant-gardistic art.
Jean Michel Jarre, a well-known user of the Theremin, has done quite some "mistakes" because it's response aren't accurate.
Isn't this just a theramin with a third axis?
8==8 Bones 8==8
An effective input device gives you feedback. An input device that you cannot feel is a step in the wrong direction, and will fail commercially and technically.
[snip]
Fingerprint is not a secret. Repeat that until it sinks in. (They use it to catch criminals because we leave them all over the place, you know.)
No shit!
$ make available
Feedback is why we're good with our hands. Waving them in the air without touching something for feedback denies us our monkey skills in moving our hands to control something. Like a theremin, which doesn't rock, because it's handflapping, not manipulating something.
I don't see what's such a big deal to touch something. How about a wireless ball that pulls apart into two hemispheres connected to a toothpick-thin telescoping segmented rod (like a car radio antenna) by a 1mm ball joint at the center of each circle of each hemisphere.Move it around in the air as a 3D clickable/draggable cursor, or pull it apart to make two points, each of which can click and drag in 3space. If it's got a little battery to shake each hemisphere when it "touches" something virtual, the control surface will make even more sense to our hands than the resulting tracking images do on the screen.
--
make install -not war
I wouldn't concern myself with how this replaces the keyboard. In practical terms, it won't, any more than the mouse did. But a good controller scheme for 3D space is practical, and a gesture system is more or less necessary to make it all work.
But a good controller scheme for 3D space is practical, and a gesture system is more or less necessary to make it all work.
No, it's not. It looks cool, but only until you're forced to wave around for more than 2 hours continuously. Not to mention the fact that now you're broadcasting to everyone in line of sight, as well as the UI.
If you are interested in this then google the Motorola chip MC33794 (E-Field Sensor). They do cost $3.00 each. Does the same thing and can be sized to a livingroom size system. I bet the Pic chip costs more than $3.00.
Why am I reminded of a DOM with 3D SVG, SMIL and [Voice]/[Music]XML?
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
It seems to me that the history of UI development, from command line to primitive windowing systems, to modern windowing UIs (with a side trip thru Jurassic Park's 3d "Unix" UI), and now 3D, has been all about making computers present a view of the world that is more like what we experience natively. That is, a 3D environment that we can move around in and manipulate, with intuitive results.
I think ultimately, 3D immersive UIs are where we're going. OTOH, the problem with the infant implementations of this concept are that we don't want to move around and manipulate stuff in a virtual environment. We want to sit on our asses and have that experience, without actually doing any of the physical work. (Aside from the energy used by the 3D UI hardware, do we really want human physical activity contributing additional heat to the environment merely to interact with that equipment?)
Honestly, it sucks that I even have to open a browser, virtual or otherwise, or interact with any kind of virtual environment, just to check the headlines every morning. I want them delivered directly to my long-term memory, no experiencing required. (Except most /. headlines, natch.)