Touchless Interface

A senior design group from Northeastern designed a touchless computer interface. You can see a video of it in action here. Using electric fields, the device is able to detect the x, y and z locations of objects over top of it. The user then waves their hand over the device to control the computer. For example, the group designed an application that allows the user to draw on the screen. The x and y coordinate determine the position on the screen and the z coordinate determines the color. The color control is very crude; it only blue-ish to green-ish colors.

Another application the group developed is 3-D object rotation. The control they showed worked pretty much just like a mouse would - move right to rotate counter-clockwise, left to rotate clockwise. It did not allow the user to rotate the object in a particularly intuitive manner. I am not sure if it is just because it was demo app or if it because the device cannot pick up that sort of motion. I suspect its some of both.