eyeSight : Wave Your Hands (Over Your Phone) Like You Just Don’t Care!
Possibly the most exciting bits of kit that we saw over the whole of Mobile World Congress was just after it was all done!
On the way out of the MWC village, Ammon Shenfeld, Project Leader of eyeSight’s R&D team gave us a quick demo of the future of phone interaction. As he put it, “What’s the only thing better than touching a button? Not touching a button!”
eyeSight’s technology is based on using either the forward-facing or photo camera which turns hand gestures into into full commands on your phone! Sounds a bit gimmicky, but the practical applications are pretty mindblowing.
Easily embeddable on top of Symbian Series 60, the eyeSight technology allows access to even the most complex of phone actions with a wave of your hand.
In a meeting and your phone rings at an inopportune moment? Simply wave your hand across the phone to silence it. Want to send them to voicemail? Then wave your hand over it in the other direction! You are even able to finally find a use for those message templates, as placing your hand close to the screen is another readable gesture, allowing your phone to automatically fire off a note to the nuisance caller! All of these gestures are fully customisable, and form the basis for eyeCall, the first of their practical applications.
Already on the way for phones on the Orange Israel network, expect to see eyeCall on a wealth of handsets in due course.
The proprietarty ‘eyeCan’ technology is as good for play as it is work, with a game called Ninja Strike making use of the phone’s underside camera. Pretend to throw shuriken, and use hand motion to destroy your enemies!
Whilst not immediately impressive as this video might seem, the feeling of doing it for the first time is as exhilerating as the first time you took a serve on Wii Sports Tennis. It just works! I tried quickly moving between menus, I moved my hand slowly and quickly, the demos on offer responded with little or no lag.
Perhaps eyeSight’s technology is not quite robust enough to be used in isolation, but imagine controlling a handset user interface like the iPhone in conjunction with this! From waving right to left to scroll through pictures, putting your hand closer to zoom out and ‘push’ a webpage away, the feeling of power is quite exciting, not to mention solving the problem of using these next-gen touchphones with crumbs on your fingers!
From the sounds of things, the integration of eyeSight in some new devices will be sooner than you think… Watch this space for further developments!
Tags: concept phone, eyecall, eyecan, eyesight, touch free integration