RoadTest: 3D Gesture-Controlled MGC3130 Hillstar Dev Kit
Author: ss_shrenik
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Evaluation Boards
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?: I didn't find any other product which detects gestures with electrodes.
What were the biggest problems encountered?: For the current problem I didn't encountered any problem. But in future I am going to use this with microcontroller rather than PC. That will be challenging I guess. The small problem I encountered is to compile provided SDK with Visual Studio 2012. But as suggested I tried VS2010 which works fine with SDK.
Detailed Review:
The GestIC technology is really amazing for gesture recognition without use of camera. I tried Aurea GUI application with this Kit which worked Out Of Box. The cube example inside Aurea application is very precise. The 3D movement (Like Rotate, Zoom In/Out)of the Cube can be controlled very precisely with Hillstar Kit. Also controlling mouse pointer and click on electrode is really appreciable because its real time and with precision. From this application I inspired to control Google earth using Hillstar Kit. Current version of implementation is not upto mark, but still I feel this works better than Camera gesture for some gestures, and also real time.
I can summarize the experience of Hillstar Kit like
1. The hardware which I got included MGC3130 board and one I2C to USB bridge which helps the MGC3130 board to use directly for PC application. The area of electrode we got in kit was sufficient for the application I did. The kit was easy to assemble. I didn't need any extra accessory to make it work for my application.
2. In Software I used SDK which can be compiled in Visual Studio. I was hoping that will compile with any version of Visual Studio as there shouldn't be any dependency wrt. the version of Visual Studio. But I was getting linker error in Visual Studio 2012, hence it forced me to use Visual Studio 2010. Apart from that the SDK provided works as mentioned by Microchip. The basic gesture which I found can be detected in provided SDK are, tap detection, left-right gesture, right-left, top-bottom, bottom-top, circle detection. I am impressed with circle detection, which was detecting even gesture is not consistent circle.
The material provide by microchip was good, you can find it here
http://www.microchip.com/pagehandler/en-us/technology/gestic/gettingstarted.html
Obvious, this technology has lots of potential to use in area where real time gesture control in near distance is required.
Hope to come with many new applications with Hillstar Kit.
Also you can get idea about what this product can do from my application blog on element14.
Implementation details-
Controlling google earth using 3D Gesture MGC3130 Hillstar Dev Kit Part - 2
Controlling google earth using 3D Gesture MGC3130 Hillstar Dev Kit Part - 3
Thanks,
Shrenik.
