Goodbye Keyboards?

 Computer Interfaces

With increasing use of multi-touch screens and novel gaming interfaces, the days of the traditional mouse and keyboard are possibly numbered. With Humantenna and SoundWave, you won't even have to touch a computer to control it, gesturing in its direction will be enough. These two technologies are the latest offerings from Microsoft, who gave us the Kinect controller. But the Kinect hardware looks clunky next to the Humantenna and SoundWave setups, which their inventors say could be built into a watch or laptop.

In a New Scientist report, two new types of technology, Humantenna and Soundwave, created by Microsoft and presented last week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Austin, Texas demonstate a potential for a keyboardless future.

Humantenna

The first, Humantenna, works just as the name suggests: It uses the human body as an antenna, turning it into a kind of universal remote control.

Humantenna senses whole-body gestures without any instrumentation to the environment and only minimal instrumentation to the user. Utilizing the existing electromagnetic noise coming from appliances and power lines, the human body acts as an antenna and receives this noise, which Humantenna uses as its signal. By measuring the voltage over time over one surface of the body, the system is able to classify which gesture the user is performing.

Humantenna can also identify the location of the user as well as the gestures being performed. This location and user information can be used for a variety of context aware ubiquitous computer applications.

The technology relies on the electromagnetic waves that already exist in the air from power lines and appliances in the home.

The user wears a device that measures the voltages that are received by the body; it then transmits those signals to a computer. The change in voltages can tell the computer which movement the body performed.

In a video below, the user can perform motions such as raising and lowering arms, stepping to the side, or doing a kick and one-two punch, and Humantenna can detect them all. So far, the researchers have found that the technology detects 12 gestures accurately more than 90% of the time.

In Austin last week, for the version of Humantenna presented, the user wore a sensor inside a small bag. That sensor has to be trained to recognize specific gestures.

Another version (to be described in a paper under review) uses a wristwatch-sized sensor that represents a step forward not only because of its size but also because it did not need to be trained to recognize gestures.

The team found patterns in low-frequency signals that allowed them to develop the system to detect the same gesture no matter what location it is performed in, or what the electromagnetic fields are in that location.

With Humantenna, people could point or swipe in the air to control lights, appliances and computers. It could also be used in fitness monitoring: Beyond pedometers and other devices that merely pick up our steps, it could track whole body movements.

The drawbacks are that changes in local electromagnetic fields prompted by the turning on and off of devices could confuse Humantenna. Also, it cannot yet differentiate between similar gestures or small movements such as the wiggling of a finger. Finally, it requires users to wear a sensor.

SoundWave

A similar technology also presented by Microsoft in Austin is SoundWave, a technology that uses an inaudible tone produced by a laptop speaker.

Moving a hand in front of the laptop changes the frequency of the sound, which the computer microphone detects. SoundWave matches these frequency changes with specific hand movements, allowing it to detect several gestures with more than 90% accuracy, even in noisy environments.

Like Humantenna, SoundWave’s ability to detect small gestures is limited. The tone also bounces off other nearby objects, causing interference. However, the technology can already detect swipes and use them to, for instance, turn on a computer, scroll through photos or rotate an image.

One very interesting potential application of SoundWave could be for proximity detection. By walking up to a display it could turn on automatically, and could turn off if a user were not present.

Unlike Humantenna, it does not need any extra technology other than the speakers and microphones that already exist in computers.

The teams developing both technologies plan to fine-tune both technologies so they respond to more than just large gestures.

It will be very interesting to see how these developments, as well as the next generation Kinect sensors, change what it means to interact with a computer.

SOURCE  New Scientist

By 33rd Square

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