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SINGAPORE: Flailing arms piqued my interest as I passed by the CommunicAsia booth for the Institute for Infocomm Research from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star).
It turned out to be a demonstration for a technology that tracks your hand gestures in real time. It is similar to how you would throw a bowling ball by swinging the remote on the Nintendo Wii, but this homegrown technology does not require any physical controllers.
“It took us about a year to develop this technology,” said Dr Corey Manders, the project’s chief developer and a senior research fellow at A*Star.
Apart from a notebook and specially-coded software, the technology uses two off-the-shelf cameras to track movements in 3D space. This enables the system to track the changes in the distance that your arm makes.
For instance, it can track how far you swing a bat in a baseball game or lob a grenade in a virtual war setting so that the game can react realistically to your movements.
At its booth, the research team showcased a virtual DJ game that lets you control a virtual turntable with a flick of your hands.
“We’re also developing a virtual dance game, with the system set up to track body movements,” said Dr Manders.
One day, this technology might even allow you to control your avatar in virtual worlds such as Second Life with regular body movements. No more tacky cyber suits!
Dr Manders added that there has been some commercial interest in the technology for outdoor advertising applications, where users can control interactive displays.
It might also fill a need in telemedicine, where a computer could help a patient rehabilitate by tracking the movement of his limbs.
Another innovation showcased at the A*Star booth was a video indexing technology that allows you to skip to the relevant parts using keywords.
It works by mining keywords from the audio portion of the video and analysing voices to annotate keywords.
So, the next time you’re watching a video clip or a DVD, you would be able to skip to the part where Phua Chu Kang says “kiasu” or when the sports commentator shouts “Goal!”.
A*Star also demonstrated a system dubbed AutoDJ that gives the talentless a fuss-free way to create personalised ringtones.
Sure, some mobile phones have ringtone-creating applications but these churn out tunes that sound far too gratingly similar to Crazy Frog or the Axel F theme.
Here, you simply record your voice or use pre-recorded audio, select a backing track and let the software process the audio bits. AutoDJ analyses your speech, rearranging and truncating it to make you sound like an MC over an ensemble of beats and vinyl scratches.
It might not sound like much, but the results are pleasantly catchy. - TODAY/fa
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