MIT students develop multicolor gloves for cheaper gesture-based interface

Gesture-based computer interface has seen many transformations over the years. The interface has gained access right from room-sized displays to something as small as laptops and smartphones. Now, with an objective to make this gesture-based interface a more practical affair, students at MIT have developed a new system that ‘consists of nothing more than an ordinary webcam and a pair of brightly colored lycra gloves.’ This would decrease the cost of the interface drastically.

multicolored gloves gesture interface

Developed by Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory together with Jovan Popović, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, the stretchy-lycra glove corresponding gestures of a 3-D model of the hand on screen which lets the user know which finger is being flexed in which gesture. The innovative glove features 20 irregularly shaped patches of 10 different colors, which capture the image from the webcam, software crops out the background to let the glove superimpose on a white background and searches for a database containing myriad 40-by-40 digital models of a hand. Once the match is found the system respond to the position of the hand and the palm in fraction of seconds. Head down for a video demonstration.

Via: MIT