Now LCD screen can recognize hand gestures
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 17 December 2009, 22:51 IST   |    23 Comments
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Now LCD screen can recognize hand gestures
London: Scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an LCD screen, which can interpret the viewer's gestures in the 3-D. Viewers can control the on-screen objects by waving their arms in the air without touching the screen, let alone a mouse or keyboard, reports ANI. "This is a level of interaction that nobody's ever been able to do before," says Ramesh Raskar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, who created the prototype shown in the video above with colleagues Matthew Hirsch and Henry Holtzman, as well as Douglas Lanman at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The screen - dubbed BiDi, short for bi-directional - allows users to manipulate or interact with objects on the screen in three dimensions. It will also function as a 3D scanner. If you spin an object in front of screen, the software will stitch together a 3D image, added Raskar. These scientists were inspired by the way manufacturers of LCD panels, including Sharp and Planar Systems, are experimenting with adding optical sensors between a panel's pixels so that it can act as a touch-screen interface. But Douglas Lanman says that such displays have poor vision, like a camera with no lens. They can clearly image objects that are in direct contact with the screen, but anything further away is blurred. The researchers try to modify the concept to let the screen see the world in front of it more sharply. Placing a tiny lens slightly in front of each sensor may do that, but the layer of lenses would adversely affect the images produced by the display. Instead, Raskar and Holtzman's team used a standard 20-inch screen to show how a basic feature of all LCD screens can perform the job of a lens array.

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