While walking through the automatic doors in THC, I sometimes waved my hands before entering so that if the timing is right, it looks like I have telekinesis power. With the current gesture recognition technology, though, waving hands to control a game or turning off televisions are no longer an impossible feat.
Microsoft is leading this technological field with Kinect, a gesture recognition platform that allows humans to communicate with computers entirely through speaking and gesturing (MarxentLab) instead of conventional input data like mice, buttons and keyboards. Here are the basic functioning principles of this technology.
Step 1: A camera will recognize the gestures as inputs, and feeds the data into a sensing device.
Step 2: The gesture is analyzed. An efficient approach is the skeletal-based algorithms, where a virtual skeleton of the person is computed and parts of the body are mapped to certain segments (Wikipedia). The position and orientation of each segments, as well as the angles and relative positions between them, would determine the prominent characteristics of the gesture.
Step 3: A software would identify the gestures based on said characteristics, scanned through a gesture library to find the correct match.
Step 4: The computer would execute the command associated with that specific gesture.
Kinect also looks at a range of other human characteristics such as facial tracking and voice recognition in addition to gesture recognition, then "reconstructs all of this data into printable three-dimensional (3D) models" (Marxentlabs). These measures helped make the algorithm better at identifying intentional gestures and carrying out the accordingly commands.
From virtual reality games where users can immerse themselves in a realistic game environments, to sliding side doors with a wave, gesture recognition proved to have a lot of potential in different fields. This technology can also be used in surgery rooms for highly sensitive tasks, especially if the medical professional may not be within reach of the display yet still needs to manipulate the content being shown on the display (Marxentlabs)
Works Cite:
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/105-artificial-intelligence/2176-kinects-ai-breakthrough-explained.html
http://www.marxentlabs.com/what-is-gesture-recognition-defined/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition#Algorithms
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