A company called Extreme Reality (XTR) announced last week the creation of XTR 3D Human Machine Interface, an advanced motion tracking software designed to work with a regular commercially available webcam. Head and arm movements would be tracked automatically, and no more complicated equipment is needed other than a relatively blank wall behind the user. It even detects when the user reaches forward, toward the camera.
I had some misgivings about this at first and didn't report it, partly because the story came from a rather obscure source (lost now, sorry), but also because it was vaporware. The website has no video footage of the software in action, and no demo versions of the software are available for download. After going back and forth with the company's founder, Dor Givon, I was able to arrange the following YouTube video for Metaversed readers:
The video shows the user being able to navigate an operating system environment, play in a couple of gaming environments, and have an avatar's movements mimic the movements captured by the camera.
Note that this wasn't a "live" demo - there's no audience (so the environments are very controlled) and the participants are moving rather slowly. Still, this is one or two small hacks away from being a great tool for creating pre-recorded motion capture animations. The uses in machinima alone could be impressive, and after being polished up a bit it could be a much cheaper (and more hygienic) alternative to actual touchscreen technology.
Interesting. Gesture Recognition made affordable - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture_recognition