Microsoft Explores The Possibilities Of In-Air Gestures Around Modern Smartphones

Microsoft Research recently revealed a new project in which they are developing an in-air gesture recognition system for smartphones. When you are holding your smartphone in one hand, you can use the other hand to make gestures to interact with the content. It augments the existing touchscreen mechanism which we are we used to. It can be applied to lots of different use cases including gaming, mapping and more.

Project Description:

We present a novel machine learning based algorithm extending the interaction space around mobile devices. The technique uses only the RGB camera now commonplace on off-the-shelf mobile devices. Our algorithm robustly recognizes a wide range of in-air gestures, supporting user variation, and varying lighting conditions. We demonstrate that our algorithm runs in real-time on unmodified mobile devices, including resource-constrained smartphones and smartwatches. Our goal is not to replace the touchscreen as primary input device, but rather to augment and enrich the existing interaction vocabulary using gestures. While touch input works well for many scenarios, we demonstrate numerous interaction tasks such as mode switches, application and task management, menu selection and certain types of navigation, where such input can be either complemented or better served by in-air gestures. This removes screen real-estate issues on small touchscreens, and allows input to be expanded to the 3D space around the device. We present results for recognition accuracy (93% test and 98% train), impact of memory footprint and other model parameters. Finally, we report results from preliminaryuser evaluations, discuss advantages and limitations and conclude with directions for future work.

Source: Microsoft