MIT Contest Winner 3dim Brings Gesture Control to Mobile Devices - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ

MIT Contest Winner 3dim Brings Gesture Control to Mobile Devices - Venture Capital Dispatch - WSJ:

"The winner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s 2013 MIT $100k business-plan competition, 3dim Tech, has created software that brings “gestural interaction” to smart mobile devices of any kind."

CES 2014: Intel Shows Off Its Depth-Detecting Camera [Video] | Popular Science

CES 2014: Intel Shows Off Its Depth-Detecting Camera [Video] | Popular Science:

"It’s part of a push by Intel to create a series of sensors under their RealSense banner that are more intuitive, and the tech is coming to gadgets from a bunch of manufacturers, like Dell, Lenovo, and HP. The company also showed off some gesture recognition tech for tablets, Leap Motion style, that could be used with the camera. "

Synaptics going driverless

DailyTech - CES 2014: Synaptics Shows Off New Touch Tech:

"One of the biggest recent innovations has been the switch to driverless devices and advance being co-championed by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).  With its latest laptop touchpads a tiny onboard ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) handles all the responsibilities directly that drivers would have done.  The tiny chip even interfaces with connected networks via the motherboard bus to updates its internal firmware."

This is a bad news for researchers and developers like myself. That means that the gesture recognition algorithms will be even further removed from software and only ones implemented in firmware by the vendor will be able to access touch sensor raw data.

The Fin Is A Bluetooth Ring That Turns Your Hand Into An Interface

TechCrunch reports: The Fin Is A Bluetooth Ring That Turns Your Hand Into An Interface | TechCrunch

Here’s how it works: by tucking an optical sensor into a small ring placed around your thumb, the Fin is able to detect swipes and taps across your hand. When it detects a gesture, it sends that command off to your connected device — be it a smartphone, TV, or another wearable device."

Product rendering:

IK Multimedia brings spatial gesture controls to iOS with 'iRing'

IK Multimedia brings spatial gesture controls to iOS with 'iRing' (via AppleInsider).

It is using front-facing camera and special "ring" with easy to detect pictogram.
Far from groundbreaking but smart.

New 'Sensus' case adds pressure-sensitive touchpads to Apple's iPhone

AppleInsider reports that New 'Sensus' case adds pressure-sensitive touchpads to Apple's iPhone.

"The Sensus case uses a proprietary new touch detecton system that parent company Canopy calls Variable Pressure Technology. Canopy's technology differs from traditional capacitive and resistive touch sensors, the company says, because it combines both touch detection and force detection into a single, rubber-like surface. "

OnTheGo raises $700k seed round to work on gestures for smart glasses

TechCruch reports:

OnTheGo Platforms believes the current smart glasses experience on devices like Google Glass is fundamentally broken. Users shouldn’t have to use a touchpad to interact with the device. Instead, OnTheGo’s vision, as it’s CEO Ryan Fink explained today, is to use the glasses’ front-facing camera to recognize gestures so people can “interact naturally with smart glasses.”

Introducing OnTheGo Platforms from OnTheGo Platforms on Vimeo.

The video from the article shows some nice demos using Google Glass. While using camera for gesture recognition is not a new idea, usually the camera us facing the user. The camera embedded in the glass gives a different perspective and allows to introduce a whole different set of gestures.