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Microsoft's Hand-Gesture Sensor Bracelet
another random user tips this quote from the BBC:
"A wrist-worn sensor that creates 3D-models of the user's hand movements in real-time has been built by Microsoft. The Digits prototype is part of an effort to create a mobile device that would allow its owner to control a range of equipment using hand gestures. The firm said it could be used as a virtual TV control, a way to operate a smartphone while it is in the user's pocket, and to play video games. It is designed to be less cumbersome and uncomfortable than sensor gloves. However, some experts question whether consumers would want to wear such a device during their day-to-day activities."
ACM has the research paper (PDF) describing this device and its use.
However, some experts question whether consumers would want to wear such a device during their day-to-day activities.
If you showed those same "experts" the bulky brick style cell phones lots of people carried in the mid-90's, they'd probably also question whether anyone would bother to lug such a thing around, while doing their day-to-day activities. Especially since all they did was take phone calls. But hey, if you can't make something cool, piss on what somebody else is doing, right?
A Ring would be so much better. One ring to rule all my appliances,
Like people who do the bluetooth headset thing while walking down the street don't look like tools as it is. Let's just throw in hand gestures for good measure! Yay society!
P.S. How on earth are we going to separate the crazies from people who are just on the phone now?!! :)
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
<eyeroll/>
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That "bracelet" is definitely going to get in the way, although it may help cure my carpel tunnel.
Oh, c'mon. You thought it too.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Take a close look at the 2 images. The CGI doesn't match the finger position.
Marketing fail
I just took it to the next level.
....the droids you're looking for.
UGLY...GORILLA
UGLY...GORILLA
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
even the "experts" apparently aren't reading TFA.
He added that the prototype had been built using existing off-the-shelf components, but there was scope to improve the equipment with customised parts.
"Ultimately we would like to reduce Digits to the size of a watch that can be worn all the time," he said.
Lots of people wear watches all the time - so when they can get it down to watch size (not if, when, given the way miniaturization of computers, cameras, etc. has progressed), I don't see any reason to suppose that people would find wearing a gesture sensor to be a burden.
And, for that matter, since the actual workings of a digital watch are tiny now, the gesture sensor could also be a watch.
Build sensor arrays where needed, no Micro$oft jewelry required...
I just hope we get holograms soon enough to be able to use leap motion sensors with them.
Who would EVER want to wear some kind of useful device on their WRIST? That's just crazy talk!
...
It looks like you're masturbating. Would you like help?
It gripped her hand gently. 'Regret is for humans,' it said.
Unfortunately, sign languages are natural languages, with the full complexity of natural languages - so you'd need to have good translation of natural languages first. To give a quick example, in ASL, the equivalent to the English "I went to Sarah's house," would be signed as something that could be represented in words as "*past-tense* Sarah possessive house I go". (The asterisks there are to indicate that ASL's past-tense indicator is a single sign, but doesn't really correspond directly to any single word in English.)
For extra fun in translation, it's common in ASL to indicate people who are around you by pointing to them with the appropriate sign. Thus, if Sarah was in the room with me, I'd sign "*past-tense* possessive house I go", making the "possessive" sign toward Sarah. (And note too that the same "possessive" hand position can mean English's "my", "your", "his", "her", "their", "our", etc., depending on who you gesture toward while making it.) For still more fun, arbitrary positions can be used as pronouns in ASL. For example, if I was going to be mentioning Sarah a lot in a conversation, but she wasn't there, I might sign "Sarah" off to my left, then later gesture in that direction to indicate that I'm talking about Sarah -- assuming, of course, that there wasn't someone standing there that you might confuse my gesture as being toward.
There is such a thing as "Signed English", which is essentially English "signed out" by using slightly modified versions of the ASL signs. Deaf people who have grown up with ASL often find Signed English to be cumbersome and slow, though - for them, it's still speaking a foreign language, since the signs are slightly different from what they're used to, and the sentence structure is completely different.
And that's just ASL -- linguists count somewhere upward of 50 different sign languages in use in the world. About two-thirds of them fall into five major families, and there's some mutual intelligibility between languages in the same family. Family relationships aren't always what you'd expect going by analogy with spoken languages, though - for example ASL (American Sign Language) and BSL (British Sign Language) are in two different families, and bear about as much relationship to each other as, say, Japanese and English.
There are groups working on the idea, though - one group that was mentioned in a story recently here on Slashdot has created a system using a glove to track finger positions which "understands" ASL-based manual spelling. That's still a long way from full ASL understanding, though - manual spelling is where the speaker signs out each letter, spelling out each word in English that way. While ASL users are used to doing that for names, it's comparatively slow. In general, it's slower than simply typing out the same message for even an average typist.
...Exactly. People talking too loud on their phones may be annoying, but at least none of them have tried to poke my eye out (at least, not since they got rid of the phones with the little antennas...).
This have the same problems than speech recognition, you say/do something that is not meant for the computer/program, and it does something that you don't mean to do. At least in Star Trek they had the "Computer" prefix in phrases meant for the computer, but adding a prefix for gestures could make their use more complex.
And, of course, doing it in public will have the problem when people is not the intended target for the gesture/speech, and if well you could use low volume (or subvocalization?) in voice, gestures should be broad enough to be able to tell them apart from i.e. casual changes of position. And innocent gestures for one culture could be very offensive for others.
Why not build it into a wristwatch?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Wow, way to put that arrow in the dirt about 30ft short.
The kinect has already been used in a crazy array of stuff Microsoft didn't even imagine, and this is obviously a prototype that you could pack into a much smaller device... already making it far more useful than it appears now, in a photo, to someone with zero imagination.
But do try again on the next one.
Unfortunately, sign languages are natural languages, with the full complexity of natural languages
Thanks, I needed a laugh! Sign languages are primitive and lack precision and expressivity. An advanced form of pointing and grunting, just without the grunting.
There's a reason that we don't have any great sign-language story-tellers. Sign languages are the bare minimum needed to communicate simple ideas. Check out some of the deaf YouTube channels and you'll see what I mean -- outside a personal setting, sign languages quickly fall apart. (Well, at least ASL does.)
one group that was mentioned in a story recently here on Slashdot has created a system using a glove to track finger positions which "understands" ASL-based manual spelling. That's still a long way from full ASL understanding
It's unlikely that we'll ever see system capable of understanding ASL or any other sign language. After all, identifying the signs alone is insufficient! (That is, a system that can recognize signs with 100% accuracy isn't good enough, for obvious reasons. That's a bad way to put it, but you get my meaning. There's a reason, after all, that there still isn't a usable sign-writing system.)
While there are other serious problems with deaf education, I have little doubt that the primacy of sign contributes significantly to the astonishingly poor level of education you'll find in the deaf community.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Leonard Nimoy should be a rich man.
In the second episode of the original Star Trek series ("The Man Trap",1966), Spock is standing next to the main view screen on the bridge of the Enterprise and uses a hand-swipe gesture ("slicing" his hand from right to left at waist level) to change the image on the main view screen.
This predates both Kinect-based systems and touchpad gesture systems by about 35 years.
I wonder if any of that has been brought up in all these lawsuits brought by Nokia, Microsoft, Samsung and Apple regarding those technologies.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this is the Mass Effect omni tool. Always wanted one of those.
In Google we trust.
Stirring hot grits motion?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
User gestures middle finger, device initiates silent IP voice feed to NSA.