Gesture Your Mouse Goodbye

Source: Wired

L33tdawg: How soon do you think it'll be before they have those cool gloves Tom Cruise used in The Minority Report ? Now that would be very nice indeed...

The most common hand gesture made toward a computer may involve one finger, usually in frustration over a lost document.

But one company is turning other natural hand movements into a sleek new way to work on the computer. FingerWorks of Newark, Delaware, has developed a technology that turns hand gestures into some of the most common computing tasks, like opening files. The technology could gain favor with people who suffer from repetitive stress injuries.

"As your fingers and hands touch the surface, the microprocessors are constantly able to observe what's going on," said John Elias, FingerWorks' president and CEO. "This is the beginning, we think, of a gesture-based language for communicating with and interacting with computers."

FingerWorks sells two types of products. The iGesture pad is about the size of a standard mouse pad. The TouchStream keyboard functions like a regular keyboard, but also incorporates the same gesture-sensing technology, eliminating the need for a mouse.

The gesturing interface works like this. To open a file, a user rotates a hand as if to open a jar. To close a file requires the opposite rotation. To cut a piece of text, pinch the fingers together, and to paste, flick the fingers outward. To zoom in, expand all five fingers, jazz-hands style. Contract the hand to zoom out.

"Unlike having to remember a sequence of keys, the gestures become part of your motor movements, so they are a part of your motor memory in your brain," Elias said. "Once you've learned them, they're almost impossible to forget. They become second nature."

The underlying technology, called MultiTouch, was developed at the University of Delaware by Elias, the professor of electrical and computer engineering who founded FingerWorks, and one of his PhD students, Wayne Westerman.

Ergonomically, it's very promising, said Alan Hedge, a professor of Design and Environmental Analysis at Cornell University who also maintains the school's ergonomics website.