After about six months of research and programming for his master's thesis, Georg Hackenberg at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology has managed to create what he and his colleagues are calling a 3-D noncontact gesture-based computer interface.
"A special image analysis algorithm filters out the positions of the hands and fingers," Hackenberg said. "This is achieved in real-time through the use of intelligent filtering of the incoming data. The raw data can be viewed as a kind of 3-D mountain landscape, with the peak regions representing the hands or fingers."
Hackenberg, who is based at the institute just outside of Bonn, said that the system is a prototype technology demo and is essentially an advanced infrared sensor on a tripod attached to a desktop computer. A 3-D wireframe displayed on the monitor serves as the desktop for the system. When someone is standing in front of the system, the infrared sensor picks up the movements of their hands, interpreting them into commands.