Gesture that Smartphones Can Appreciate

Can't get to the phone? Try waving at it. A device that enables a smartphone's camera to recognize gestures – without gobbling up precious battery life – looks set to transform the way we make calls.

Microsoft's Kinect and the soon-to-be-released Leap Motion have thrust 3D gesture-recognition technology into the mainstream. Touchless phones, however, are still a rarity. Korean company Pantech released a smartphone in 2011 that could use its camera to recognize simple gestures. But across the industry the capability has yet to catch on: of the 1.6 billion mobile devices shipped in 2012, just 27 million (about 0.2 per cent) were equipped with gesture-sensing technology, according to ABI Research, a market research firm based in New York.

One reason may be that existing techniques infer gestures based on 2D images captured by a phone's camera. This is problematic because visually cluttered backgrounds can confuse the software, as can low-light settings. Kinect and Leap Motion illuminate an area with either an infrared laser or intense infrared light to capture depth information about a scene, but this guzzles too much power to be useful on a mobile device.

Now Andrea Colaço at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in Cambridge and colleagues have developed a system called 3dim that augments standard smartphone cameras with a low-powered infrared light source. 3dim's software then looks for mathematical structures in the 2D image data in order to simplify the scene. Differences in the time that the infrared light takes to bounce off objects and return to the camera are used to gauge how far away those objects are.

Colaço claims this approach allows 3dim to function in difficult environments while tracking 10 fingers to within a millimetre in space. She says her prototype only demands a few milliwatts of additional power from the phone – about one-seventh of the amount used by a standard smartphone camera.

Colaço presented 3dim at the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition on 15 May. It could be included in the next generation of smartphones, she says, and adapted to work with wearable devices such as Google Glass.

Tobias Höllerer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sees more promise for 3dim as a Google Glass system because he thinks it's awkward to make gestures while you're holding a phone. "Maybe the phone is not the device that will see this through. Maybe it will be glasses," he says.

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Okky Eldiana Muliaputri

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