Gesture Based Computing on LCD

The students at MIT are at it again, turning your everday LCD screen into a low-cost, 3-D gestural computing system.

As you can see, users can not only control the system by touching the screen along its x and y axis, but also along the z. That is you hand can be tracked based on relative distance away from the screen! Though such technologies have been implmneted before, using a variety of tracking cameras, or special gloves, a low cost system has yet to be devised.

Ultimately, this technology could prove quite a promising alternative to our everyday user interface needs. Particularly, the availability of such technologies on our smaller devices, such as laptops and cellphones, would greatly increase usability.

The human body is obviously limited in range of size, thus designing our devices relative to just two-dimensional space seems inefficient. If instead we were to design more devices that allow for a 3rd dimension of input, a whole new foundation of digital input could be made.

It is not just that we won't have our fingers on the screens anymore, as it is, the dimension of depth opens up a whole new opportunity to immersive technology interfaces. I will include a deeper exploration on such possibilities in my impending haptics technology article.

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