Admit it, controlling a computer with wildly flailing hand gestures like in the movie ‘Minority Report’ is something we’ve all wanted to do, no? Ok you’re either going to admit it or I’m not going to continue with the article! That’s better, now let’s continue. It’s now possible to do so thanks to Microsoft’s Kinect and a few brainiacs from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Systems Robotics Engineer Garratt Gallagher used the Kinects sensor along with the libfreenect driver and a ROS open source robotics program to interface with a special GUI designed by MIT. This allows the sensor to detect hands and fingers moving at high flailing speeds. For more information and a video of the program in action please visit: http://www.csail.mit.edu/node/1362. The ROS open source program can be found and downloaded for free at: http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect
The video below shows the achievment in action. What I notice immediately is the speed at which the Kinect senses and deals with the user, it is truly a real time experience. The , on the other hand, feels like a satellite link. The delay is ,at times, intolerable. So, perhaps from the community of developers, Microsoft will take some pointers and improve the interaction speed.
Eavesdropper