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Microsoft Corp.’s Project Natal may face competition from a pair of crazy-quilted rubber cleaning gloves and a webcam, according to MIT.
Robert Wang, a graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Jovan Popović, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, have created software that allows any webcam to see the gestures performed by a user wearing their colorful Lycra gloves in three dimensions, and interpret the gestures as commands to a computer.
Picture Tony Stark disassembling his armor CAD images on his computer simply using gestures. That is what the MIT researchers show off in the video posted on MIT’s website.
While the industrial and academic applications are obvious, Wang specifically calls out the videogame market in the MIT article. So, while Microsoft probably dumped many millions into developing Natal – a system that can interpret very broad physical gestures into on-screen actions – these MIT upstarts have a system that allows for fine control, using gloves that would likely cost a couple of bucks, a cheap webcam, and about a 300 megabyte to 500 megabyte software install.
In fact, in keeping with the on-the-cheap philosophy behind the system, Wang and his partners have developed a way to calibrate the system by simply putting the glove on an 8.5 by 11-inch sheet of paper.
So, how long before Microsoft licenses the technology from MIT?
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