Minority Report-style swishery demoed with cheap webcam

HPC blog New tech at GTC12 lets punters pretend to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report: opening windows, moving them, closing them, and essentially acting like a cool, futuristic cop.

Eyesight Mobile Technologies performed an interesting demonstration on the exhibit floor. In the video, marketing director Liat Rostock shows us how the firm's software, using just a cheap consumer webcam, allows you to control a laptop with hand gestures.

There will be some differences, of course. In the movie, Cruise is looking at highly sophisticated analytics on holographic displays, moving from screen to screen to quickly find a potential murderer. You, on the other hand, will most likely be pulling up Star Trek fan fiction sites to see if there are any new entries, monitoring eBay to bid on an original Day of the Triffids poster autographed by Howard Keel, and, of course, reading The Reg.

Regardless of your usage, it’s an interesting product, and the demo gave me a lot of ideas about potential uses. But I’d include a little surprise for impolite users – sort of a laptop revenge feature. If a user raises a middle finger to the camera, the next thing they’d see on the screen is the message “Format C: Y/N?” Flipping it off again will answer a big “Y” to that question. Getting frustrated with a system is no excuse for being rude – RDFM first.

Anyway, you can see the brief demo here.

Rostock also shows us how the technology is being deeply integrated into various other devices, including an Android smartphone. ®