Hand gesture control is not a new thing its been shown in many sci fi movies and the most known is for Minority Report. However I have also played with it about 2 years ago which is a webcam that could see your hand movement and can analyze the difference between hand gesture and can put what it would do between the hand gesture. Now even Xbox have a same system called kinetic however 2 years ago a company Mgestyk would made a system that would use a 3d webcam however now 2 years later still have not seen the system gone on sale.
However I also tried a system which did not made use of a 3d webcam but can also be done with any normal webcam. What it does is it searches the color of your hands and it will only look at your hands and also looks at the gestures. However that system was very crude and it works better with a glove on if your background is same color plus it often recognize your face as on of the hands. So you often had to wear a glove with a certain color.
However most of the researches and developements I found stopped in 2006 and I haven’t seen much until today another vid shown up at TED talking about hand gestures.
They asked when but actually its already available to download and use but it still to crude and not many have done much to made them to work much smoother. If you want to try it out visit this website and download the software.
However now the iPhone 4 have a front facing camera, the development of new apps would probably make allot of use of that. And in a near future there will be someone making an app for hand gesture so you don’t even have to touch the multitouch screen at all but just hold the iPhone in front of you hand use hand gesture to control it, either the interface or also games. Especially the front facing camera will be used for plenty of games and if the hand gesture of the iPhone would blow up I am sure that Apple will be the first to implement the system on the Mac systems, making a touchscreen, tablets keyboards or mouse obsolete.
And now watch a video by StudioSmack called Pimp my Planet, a video with interesting gesture control how to control the planet. However this is all effects and not real.
I hope that within 5 years to see more hand gesture control on personal computers instead of only having it on game consoles. And if I got time I might try some hand gesture controls on a website of mine.
