One of the things that the Kinect made possible after KinectHackers had a chance to play around with it was to create interesting alternatives to the mouse. People didn’t have to spend a fortune to have something that would let them use gestures in order to control their computer setups.
Today’s featured hack is another attempt at creating a better gestural interface for computers. What’s different about this hack is that the developers are promising that their app, called 3Gear SDK, makes the Kinect “finger precise”:
“We’re using 3D camera hardware (e.g., the Microsoft Kinect) to make this possible. However, existing Kinect software only work on large, full-body motions. We’ve developed software that creates a finger-precise representation of what your hands are doing, capturing tiny motions of your index finger and subtle movements of the wrist. This means your applications can use small, comfortable gestures such as pinching and pointing rather than sweeping arm motions.
“To make this work, we had to develop new computer graphics algorithms for reconstructing the precise pose of the user’s hands from 3D cameras. A key component of the algorithm is to use a database of pre-computed 3D images corresponding to each possible hand configuration in the workspace. The 3D image database is efficiently sampled and indexed to enable extremely fast searches. At run-time, the images from the 3D cameras are used to “look up” the pose of the hand using the database. This way, the user’s hand pose can be determined within milliseconds — fast enough for interactive applications and a short enough time to avoid the effects of “lag” or high latency.”
It’s definitely interesting to see it in action and, judging by what’s presented in their demo video, another hack that could definitely go a long way.
To learn more about 3Gear SDK and other projects from the developer, be sure to visit the link below.
