Students from IIT Kharagpur are developing a device that will enable gesture control on devices including PCs, Laptop and even a Television.
Called as WaveMac sensor, this small device connects via USB to a laptop or a PC which enables it to be gesture controlled by wearing a small ring cap at the end of the finger. The device allows upto 15 feet of distance for accurate gesture controls.
At present, there not too many details available on their website, but from the video demo released by them, the device looks quite promising.
We got in touch with Harshit Shrivastava, one of students behind WaveMac and he was not too forthcoming about the product as yet. However, he did mention that they are planning to launch the device by the end of the year, and currently have only developed a prototype.
Using WaveMac gesture control, users can perform various tasks on their computers including playing games, opening applications, consuming multimedia content, browsing the web and many more.
Here, check out the video demonstration on WaveMac
Currently, WaveMac supports only PCs and Laptops, but they also plan to extend it for televisions to make them gesture controlled.
Harshit Shrivastava also told us that they are developing the product independently and not as a project at IIT Kharagpur.
It is quite interesting that WaveMac already has put up pre-order pricing on their website, even though they are currently only at prototype state. WaveMac basic is priced at USD 24.99, while the premium version is priced at USD 59.99. They have not mentioned any details about the difference between Basic and premium versions.
WaveMac is not the first device that has been conceived for gesture control – San Francisco based Leap Motion has a similar device priced at USD 79.99. Another company called Thalmic Labs has a device called MYO, which allows controlling the device through hand gesture. There are few more products across the world that are currently being developed offer similar functionality!
However, it is great to see Indian students, who are not even yet out of college, coming up with devices based on this cutting edge technology!
I’d me more specific to know how would these people integrate it with the more of the common softwares like firefox, VLC, File manager etc for regular things like previous, next. Gesture control seems more easy and feasible than voice recognition in my opinion. So far as my knowledge is considered, Sony VAIO even comes with gesture controls, i believe