Multicolored Gloves for Gesture-based Interface

We all remember the black-clad Tom Cruise from the Steven Spielberg's 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report where he stands in front of a transparent screen manipulating a host of video images simply by waving his hands

Ever since that stint, Technologists from all over the world have been trying to make that feat a reality. And recently, MIT researchers have developed a system that could make gestural interfaces more practical and cheaper. Only a single piece of hardware: a multicolored Lycra glove that could be manufactured for about a dollar would be used to do achieve this. These lycra gloves have 20 irregularly shaped patches in 10 different colors. The pattern is made to be used in companion with a webcam, and you can use many gestures to translate into certain commands.

#-Link-Snipped-#The most obvious application of this technology as of now should be Video Games. Gamers navigating a virtual world could pick up and wield objects simply by using hand gestures. But Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory says, Engineers and designers could use it to easily manipulate 3-D models of commercial products or large civic structures.

The arrangement and shapes of the patches was chosen so that the front and back of the hand would be distinct but also so that collisions of similar-colored patches would be rare. For instance, Wang explains, the colors on the tips of the fingers could be repeated on the back of the hand, but not on the front, since the fingers would frequently be flexing and closing in front of the palm.

Well, as we all know such systems are already commonly used to convert actors' live performances into digital animations.

But a system based on this technique could prove significantly cheaper and easier to use.