Daily News Courier

Asus Laptops and Desktops to Ship With Leap Motion’s Gesture Control

Laptop buyers will get access to a device capable of tracking finger motions with sub-millimeter accuracy.

A device that makes it possible to control a computer with fluid mid-air finger motions will be bundled with some PCs from Taiwanese company Asus in coming months. The distribution deal is the most significant move yet by startup company Leap Motion to distribute its first product, which allows desktop software to respond to swipes, pokes, and grabs made in front of a screen (see

A Look Back at Predictive Assistants and Lurching Giants

In 2012, hardware and software brought us usability advances, faster chips, and gesture control.

One of the most interesting threads of innovation in computing over the past 12 months can be traced back to the preceding year. In 2011, Apple

A New Chip to Bring 3-D Gesture Control to Smartphones

A large semiconductor manufacturer uses electrical fields to sense hand movements.

The clickwheel of the first iPod worked by measuring electric field disturbances in one dimension. The first iPhone touch screen functioned similarly, but in two dimensions.

Microsoft’s Plan to Bring About the Era of Gesture Control

Apple might have made the touch screen ubiquitous, but Microsoft thinks hands-free interfaces will be just as big.

While most of the headlines about Microsoft this fall will concern its new operating system, Windows 8, and its new Surface tablet, the company is also working hard on a long-term effort to reinvent the way we interact with existing computers. The company wants to make it as common to wave your arms at or speak to a computer as it is to reach for a mouse or touch screen today.

What Comes After the Touch Screen?

Gesture control, devices that recognize different people, and tricks to make a screen feel as if it has physical buttons could be coming to your gadgets.

In a few short years, the technologies found in today’s mobile devices—touch screens, gyroscopes, and voice-control software, to name a few—have radically transformed how we access computers. To glimpse what new ideas might have a similar impact in the next few years, you need only to have walked into the Marriott Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, this week. There, researchers from around the world demonstrated new ideas for computer interaction at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. Many were focused on taking mobile devices in directions that today feel strange and new but could before long be as normal as swiping the screen of an iPhone or Android device.

Gesture Control System Uses Sound Alone

SoundWave lets an ordinary laptop function like a Kinect sensor.

When you learned about the Doppler Effect in high school physics class—the wave frequency shift that occurs when the source of the wave is moving, easily illustrated by a passing ambulance—you probably didn’t envision it helping control your computer one day.

Mobile Nations Monday Brief – July 18, 2011

Formerly known as the Best of Smartphone Experts, and now in Video!

Blog – Eigengestures And Minority Report-style Computer Interfaces

The analysis of human hand gestures has identified a new kind of “eigengesture” that could be used as a basis of 3D gesture control, say computer scientists

What’s the best way to control a computer using 3D gestures? One answer is that the best gestures are the most natural ones. But that leaves a puzzle: how do you determine the most natural gestures?