24 November 2008

Nokia's 3D Touchless Control Interface

It is funny how everyone's suddenly writing about almost a year old Nokia patent as it is a "breaking news story"!?

How this all started up again and became big in the news!? Who is responsible :]

Yes, you're right, I'm talking about the Nokia's '3D Touchless Control Interface' that I wrote about why back in January!

Anyway, for those who don't know, it is new Nokia’s multi-touch like technology, that does not requires touch and can track your hand movements in three dimensional space. Actually it goes beyond multi-touch as it is even capable to recognize complex 3D gestures and provide effortless and touchless interaction with the User Interface through natural hand gestures!

This form of giving commands to phone would make many situations safer and more pleasant than they are today, it is really huge departure from graphical into the world of Natural user interface and I just hope that we will not need to wait so long to try it out!

A whole new generation of applications as well as games could be created if the technology involved were able to identify and interpret complex human gestures on the right way in the real time.

Gestures enable people to communicate without the need for spoken words and try to imagine how useful it would be if this type of communication were also possible between humans and mobile devices? Undoubtedly there are numerous possibilities and I just hope that whole concept is ready for implementation on the actually phones equipped with camera sensors.

While the Microsoft using uses IR transmitters positioned along both sides of the phone to track gestures on the surface, Nokia decided to use Ultrasonic Transducers (USTs), arrayed around the perimeter of the display which enables more complex gestures.

Ultrasonic transducers emit ultrasonic sound waves that propagate through air. When finger gets into the path of these waves, the signal is reflected back and detected by the transducer.

Three or more transducers (14 A-B-C in picture above) arrayed around a perimeter of the mobile device create a 10-20 cm working volume of space above the display, where user finger ( 20A and B) locations and their movements in real time can be detected using triangulation techniques. These movements can then be interpreted as various three dimensional gestures.

To ease the operation of the device, visual finger pointers (12A, B) are displayed on the screen of mobile device. 3D gestures are translated into various object oriented, or gesture/browsing oriented commands. The patent application gives several examples.