Telecom Lead India: 600 million smartphones will be
shipped with vision-based gesture recognition features in 2017.
Gesture recognition is a very exciting prospect,
particularly for smartphones and tablets. These devices are already heavily
entrenched into peoples’ lives and another communication interface is always
very welcome,” said ABI Research senior analyst Josh Flood.
Top game consoles – Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s
PlayStation – have gesture recognition equipment; Kinect and PlayStation Eye
respectively.
Several challenges remain for gesture recognition
technology for mobile devices, including effectiveness of the technology in
adverse light conditions, variations in the background, and high power
consumption. These problems can be overcome with different tracking solutions
and new technologies.
Chip major Qualcomm has been promoting its Snapdragon
chipset processors’ visional gesture recognition technology in 2012.
Intel has focused upon touch capabilities for its
notebooks and ultrabooks this year. Intel has acknowledged gesture and voice
recognition will be a big deal in the computing sector next year.
Currently, only a small number of the smartphones shipped
have gesture recognition.
Pantech, a Korean smartphone OEM, started selling its
Vega LTE handset in Korea in November 2011 with gesture recognition technology
using camera-based tracking.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor will offer smartphone
OEMs the ability to have camera, infrared, and ultrasound based tracking.
These tracking solutions give smartphone OEMs and app
designers some attractive techniques for new interactions and enhancing the
users experience. Additionally, gesture recognition will be useful for media
tablets, portable media players, and portable game players. It is projected a
higher percentage of media tablets will have the technology than smartphones.
Qualcomm acquires gesture recognition assets from GestureTek
Recently, Qualcomm acquired certain assets from GestureTek,
a developer of gesture recognition technology. GestureTek has more than 25
years of experience implementing gesture-based technologies in mobile devices,
entertainment facilities, healthcare systems, retail locations, and public and
private venues.
