Engineering On The Edge

Everyone loves their touchscreens. Without a touchscreen, the boom of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets would never really have gotten off the ground. A mouse is a solid interface device, a stylus (or light pen) has its merits, but touchscreens provide a tactile interface easily grasped even by children. With all it has going for it, the touchscreen might soon be obsolete.

Gesture control is the next big thing for interfacing with everything from mobile devices to TVs. Located in Israel, eyeSight is bringing gesture control to Windows 8. This particular gesture recognition system is a software solution that uses a standard 2D camera (like those found in almost every mobile device or laptop) to capture pokes, waves, lifts and more.

A potential commercial use for eyeSight's gesture recognition technology. Courtesy of eyeSight.

One particular feature of the program touted by the company is called eyeKeys, which allows the user to bind gestures to existing keyboard shortcuts. According to the company, eyeKeys makes it easier to use programs like PowerPoint or control media galleries from a distance. The program accepts input from multiple users, which could provide a more engaging experience for presentations or allow multiple people to work on the same project.

“The Windows 8 user-interface has been designed beautifully for touch,” commented Gideon Shmuel, CEO, eyeSight Mobile Technologies, “and OEMs are now hungry for a simple-to-integrate, mass market answer to touch-free control. And as hardware-based solutions incur significant costs, time and real-estate issues, software is clearly the best way to achieve this.

“Other solutions require that users adapt to perform slightly stiff or fixed movements to recognize gestures. eyeSight’s software, on the other hand, is designed to recognize various natural ways in which users perform gestures. Customers will flock to the devices that provide the most comfortable and natural user-experience, and so we have put this requirement front-and-center.”

eyeSight says their new program is compatible with most operating systems (Apple’s iOS, Android, Linux and previous Windows versions) and can be developed to work with other systems, such as navigation aids.

Below you’ll find a video about eyeSight.

Source: eyeSight