Microsoft Research Gestures at Me (video)
Really great walking tour with Kevin Schofield of Microsoft Research.
This is a 50-minute monster. Not for the faint of heart.
But, if you do the download, make sure and catch what starts at around 36:00. It is f**king awesome.
What is Andy Wilson (the guy who did Bill Gates’ CES keynote demo last year) showing?
A video camera. Aimed at his hands. The picture above gives you a hint. His hands are controlling the keyboard — without touching anything.
The software he wrote is magical. You gotta see the video.
The rest of the video is interesting too. Oh, and you see Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of Activewords, ducking in behind Kevin in a few places in the video too. Anyway, enjoy.
UPDATE: I should have linked to Kevin’s blog.
Oh, and did you catch my plug of Valleyschwag?
UPDATE2: someone took just the Andy Wilson piece of the video and uploaded it to YouTube.
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November 8th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
That was a cool video. I saw a similar thing at the MSFT Museum / Visitor Center, I think it was this past summer. It’s definitely a Minority Report sort of thing. I commented about it saying that if I saw something like that when I was in elementary school, it would have totally captured my attention and focus to go make things like that. Very cool!
November 9th, 2006 at 3:55 am
The Blue Rendezvous demo reminded me of another similar technology with a similar name, Rendezvous.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/bonjour/
November 9th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
MSR just released tech preview of photosynth
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
check it out, its good
November 9th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
The cool part of Blue Rendezvous isn’t about low-level networking code that allows for discovery of devices. It’s about the user interface you build on top of that, that lets you do very cool things effortlessly.
Scoble, thanks for the link and for taking the time to do the tour! It was great fun.
November 10th, 2006 at 10:01 am
Robert you do awesome videos, but why aren’t they uploaded in flash just like youtube. It will make them really easy to watch.
November 10th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Robert:
If you see Kevin Schofield again, ask him if he has solved his frustration with the repetitive hand movement from keyboard to mouse.
from the “father of the perfect keyboard”
November 10th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Robert,
Have the vision system differentiate between different shapes.
It looks as though he was using a simple grey scale recognition system defining a circle of his average thumb and forefinger. User definable shapes “Live long and Prosper” etc. would allow all the functionality of the mouse as we know it today.
Cool cheap camera. Most inexpensive vision systems are in the $10K range. Computer users do not need that level of camera’s to do some of the simpler functions. I want to go back when I have time and view this again. Thousands of applications if you have perfected the interface and simplified the algorthyms.
I wanted to use vision systems years back in another area, however, the technology was not at the 6 Sig level yet. Looks like things may be getting closer.
When I have time, I want to come back and invest the time in viewing the whole V-log.
WCS Way cool stuff. Check out MIT’s toys.
November 10th, 2006 at 3:06 pm
great show, thx
November 13th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
[...] (via Scoble.) [...]
November 29th, 2006 at 5:03 am
[...] Just recently released on the Scoble show, Microsoft engineer Andy Wilson has been responsible for building the gesture recognition software, which allows you to make a gesture with your hand, have it captured with a $30 webcam and then translated into a command of your choosing. [...]