When we saw how Kinect picked up our exact body movements and we were able to feel like we were actually bowling (or boxing, etc.), our minds couldn’t really fathom it all, but without realizing, we wanted to keep playing and playing until our arms felt like they were going to fall off; this new technology had completely changed the way we play video games.
But now there’s a new gesture interface system that blows Kinect out of the water: the Displair touch system, allowing you to take computer-generated images and make them visible in thin air in just a matter of seconds.
Natasha Starkell writes, “Displair’s award-winning technology, developed in a student dormitory, has only 0.2 seconds lag time between gesture and computer reaction, compared to a 0.1 second lag time of KInect for Xbox 360, using up to 1500 points in its multi-touch screen system with 1cm accuracy. Microsoft Research is also making advances in gesture recognition, as is demonstrated in the video[,] however such technology is not commercially available yet.”
CEO of the Russian company based in Astrakhan, Maxim Kamanin, thinks the DisplAir technology could be prominent in none other than the advertising market.
So how does a system like this work?
Upon the stream of cold fog acting as a “screen,” images are produced through an infrared camera to pick up any gestures, compared to Kinect’s camera movement-detecting technology that can only respond to movements at large, ultimately producing an image in thin air, so to speak.
In Finland they are also toying around with this phenomenon. An organization Fog Screen “adds wow factor with its large air displays to the entertainment and retail industries,” and “[use] multi-touch laser movements [for] [...] special effects such as brick wall collapsing as a person walks through.”
With all of this advanced technology comes a hefty price: between $4,000- $30,000 gets you the DisplAir, depending on size, etc.
We want to try! For the time being looks like we’ll envy Tom Cruise as he strolls through the mall in Minority Report…
(via TechCrunch)
Related posts:
