gestures

Design 3D lava lamps with gestures on Handy-Potter

Gestural interfaces like the Leap promise a world in which we'll all be driving cars and flying planes by waving our hands in the air, "Minority Report"-style.

Pudue University is joining the fun with the Handy-Potter, a design tool that lets you fashion 3D virtual objects with your bare hands.

Recently presented at the ASME 2012 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference in Chicago, the research won the All-Conference Best Paper award.

The Handy-Potter is a departure from traditional computer-aided design. It works with the Microsoft Kinect to track the user's body and hand gestures, modifying 3D shapes according to motions such as waving or pulling. … Read more

How to enable touch-pad gestures on Windows 8 laptops

Installing the Windows 8 RTM (release-to-manufacturing) on my two laptops went smoothly yesterday except for one problem -- no gesture support.

Trying to navigate the Start screen and other areas of the new OS, I found that left and right clicking on the touch pad worked fine. But using two fingers or other gestures to scroll or move around had no effect.

A Web search discovered other testers and users bumping into the same obstacle. This is odd, because I ran into no such problems with the Windows 8 Release Preview. So why doesn't Windows 8 RTM handle touch-pad … Read more

Four ways to access Mountain Lion's Notification Center

Notification Center is a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion that helps you keep all of your important alerts and notifications in one place. The claim of convenience can only be true if it's truly convenient to access and use. Luckily, there are a few different ways to access the tray of notifications hidden under your desktop. Let's take a look at four of them.

Menu bar

The most obvious way is by clicking on the Notification Center icon in the menu bar. You can click the icon to reveal and hide Notification Center. There's nothing … Read more

Intel invests in motion sensing: Looks to future interfaces

Intel Capital has invested in a company that provides motion-sensing technology, hinting at possible future user interfaces for personal computing devices.

Grenoble, France-based Movea said this week that it has secured 6.5 million euros (about $7.9 million) in funding from Intel Capital.

"We look forward to...increasing our involvement in the MEMS and motion sensing space in general," said Erik Jorgensen, investment director for Intel Capital, in a statement. "We believe the role MEMS plays in technology, particularly on the mobile side, is going to continue to increase at a rapid pace."

MEMS, or … Read more

Leap Motion: Gesture tech's come-hither allure

Developers eager to be among the first to create applications for Leap Motion's new gesture control system think it could be used to auto-translate sign language.

That was among the details the company released this morning about the initial round of requests from developers to design tools that work with the Leap -- technology that lets users control what's on their computers with hundredth of a millimeter accuracy with nothing more than their fingers or their hands.

The San Francisco company said that in the two months since pulling back the wraps on the Leap, more than 26,… Read more

Microsoft Touch Mouse to get a feel for Windows 8 gestures

Microsoft is sprucing up its Touch Mouse to give upcoming Windows 8 users a helping hand.

Both the Touch Mouse and the Explorer Touch Mouse already support horizontal as well as vertical scrolling. So users who upgrade to Windows 8 can continue to use both devices just as they are.

But Microsoft is unveiling a new set of gestures designed specifically to help you navigate your way around Windows 8. Tapping into the new gestures will be a matter of downloading Microsoft's new Device Center, a program that can take full advantage of your mouse and keyboard in the … Read more

Gesture control coming to Windows 8 computers

Wave at your new computer. Technology from PointGrab might soon be there to watch you. The Israeli company, which builds gesture-recognition technology, says it's in talks with many vendors bringing out Windows 8 laptops this year.

Currently, PointGrab technology is deeply embedded in a few TV sets from one manufacturer. PointGrab executives begged me not to name the vendor, but there's only one company shipping gesture-controlled TVs so it's not hard to figure it out.

In the living room environment, the technology makes a lot of sense. Instead of having to poke at buttons to control your … Read more

Angry Birds to land on Samsung TVs

After soaring into the PC and mobile world, Angry Birds is flapping into its next arena -- smart TVs.

Samsung today announced the launch of a new Angry Birds app (English translation) designed for certain of its smart TVs.

Tapping into Samsung's Smart Interaction gesture recognition, game players will be able to use gestures and voice commands to target the angry birds in their battle against the pigs.

Due out sometime this month, the Angry Birds app will be compatible with Samsung's smart TVs ES7000, ES8000, and ES9000. Taking advantage of Samsung's newly-updated Smart TV SDK, the … Read more

Kinect in the car? It's coming

Microsoft placed a want ad for a software engineer with its Connected Car QA team to aid in the development and testing of the next-generation connected car platform. Based on the job description on Microsoft's Web site, it looks like the technology giant has embedded every product it offers in the dash:

For the next generation of the Connected Car Platform, we plan to leverage the full power of the Microsoft ecosystem including Kinect, Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Live, Bing, Azure, and Tellme. The combination of rich local sensing, user identification, cloud access, and data mining will transform … Read more