The gesturespace is the final thesis of my interaction design studies at the Zurich University of Arts. It is an immersive interactive projection that can be controlled very precisely by simply using your hands and body. Like this, it is possible to have interactive applications e.g. in museums or at expositions. Without the need for any additional tools, you can browse through images and zoom into 3d models – just with your own hands!
The installation was presented for one week at the Zurich University of the Arts. The Feedback from the public was excellent. Strongly appreciated was that it was possible to come and try everything out. When I started the thesis in January, there was some discussion about the usefulness of such an application and whether it was even possible to build all this in just 3 months.
This thesis addresses several base research topics in interaction design (touchless IxD in particular):
In my thesis, I developed an algorithm for the parallel recognition of hand and body movements. This is being done by inserting an imaginary layer between the camera and the body. This layer seperates hands and body. The detailed algorithm is described in the paper (see related links). The trick is how to calculate the optimal position for this layer – which is being done by using distance statistics. Only using distances of points instead of any recognition algorithm makes the procedure very stable.
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A common problem in 2d vision based image tracking is the separation of the body of a person from the background scene. In this work, I use a 3d infrared video camera to achieve a more precise tracking. The camera measures distances for each pixel in the image. With the algorithms developed in this work, it is possible to securely seperate the hands from the body, and the body from the background of a scene. All in real-time (17 frames/s), with no delay, with a very high precision.
