gestures

Mauz goes all 'Minority Report' as a mouse replacement

LAS VEGAS--We tech writers are constantly comparing real products to what we've seen in sci-fi movies. I'm still waiting for my Hoverboard, but at least we're inching a little closer to some "Minority Report"-style computer interfaces with the Mauz, a device that turns your iPhone into a mouse with special skills.

Mauz is like a combination of the Wii remote, the Kinect, and a desktop mouse. It involves a small device that plugs into your iPhone and an app that makes the magic happen.… Read more

Elliptic Labs uses ultrasound for touchless gesture control

LAS VEGAS--Touch screens are so last year.

These days, touchless gesture control is the hot thing. Just last week, San Francisco startup Leap Motion, which developed a motion-control technology with sub-millimeter accuracy, announced a $30 million B round of funding. And at CES here, there are multiple companies showing off technology that lets users control their computers with little or no physical contact with a screen or a mouse.

One of them is Palo Alto, Calif.-based Elliptic Labs, which has pioneered an ultrasound-based touchless gesture control system. In a demo for CNET, Elliptic showed off its Windows 8 Gesture … Read more

Voice recognition will make touch obsolete, Intel exec says

LAS VEGAS -- Watch out, touch screens. You may be hot now, but one Intel executive predicts voice recognition will eventually make you obsolete.

Mooly Eden, the Intel senior vice president who oversees the company's "perceptual computing" operations, told CNET today that voice recognition will do to touch what touch has done to physical keyboards -- making many things unnecessary.

"Voice is the best means of communication between humans," Eden said. "We finally have enough compute power to do what we want from science fiction."

Intel is working with partners on complete systems … Read more

Extreme Reality makes your camera a 3D gaming system

LAS VEGAS--I avoid buying new hardware whenever possible, so if I can add functionality to my existing gear with a simple software solution, I'm interested.

Extreme Reality (XTR3D) does just that. It turns your run-of-the-mill 2D camera into a full-body motion control system for fully interactive gaming.

The idea is you can forget Microsoft's Kinect. … Read more

LG pops out improved Magic Motion remote

LG has unleashed its newest Magic Motion remote control weeks ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and it includes several improvements such as natural voice recognition and even backlighting.

The new television remote now uses four methods of control -- voice, gesture, point, and wheel -- and while the wheel was introduced this year, gestures and "natural" speech are new.

LG is taking on Samsung with its new natural speech feature; while Samsung users have to say "Hi, TV" to get the television to register, LG claims that phrases like "Show me '… Read more

Leap Motion giving 10,000 developers free Leaps

Leap Motion, which created an innovative gesture control technology that measures users' movements to an accuracy of a hundredth of a millimeter, is expanding its developer program and releasing a new software development kit.

According to Michael Buckwald, CEO of the San Francisco startup, Leap Motion is giving 10,000 developers free Leap units over the next two weeks in a bid to dramatically increase the number of potential applications being designed to work with the new technology.

All told, 40,000 people have applied to be part of Leap Motion's developer program, in part because the number of … Read more

Gesture controls grow up

There's a school of thought that says consumers have been secretly trained in the ways of gesture control for years, starting with laptop touch pads, then smartphone screens, and even the motion-controlled Nintendo Wii. Gesture controls, whether hands-on, via a screen or input pad, or hands-off, via camera control, are now everywhere, including televisions, game consoles, and PCs.

Hands-on gesture control has moved far beyond iOS and Android devices, with an entire new operating system, Windows 8, practically built around multifinger swiping, either on a touch screen, or via one of the increasing number of oversize touch pads these … Read more

Enable swipe-to-delete in Gmail 4.2 on Android

One feature Android users have been asking for in the Gmail app has been the ability to swipe and delete or archive a message. With the release of Gmail 4.2, that's now possible.

By default, the swipe gesture is set to archive or delete a message, depending on whether the message has already been archived. Should you want to change it to always delete (or disable the feature altogether), you'll need to dive into the settings.

To enable swipe-to-delete, make sure you have the latest version of Gmail running on your Android device. After you've updated, … Read more

Bringing 'Minority Report' touchless gestures to Windows 8

Elliptic Labs wants to bring the touchless gesture controls seen in the science-fiction film "Minority Report" to everyday consumer electronic devices, starting with Windows 8.

The company -- a Norwegian university spinout with offices in Oslo and Silicon Valley -- unveiled a set of tools to help consumer electronic companies enable touchless controls in their products. These would be similar to the kind of gesture controls seen with the Xbox 360 Kinect and in certain smart televisions like a few models from Samsung Electronics, but presumably would work more smoothly.

That's because the Elliptic device won't … Read more