30 March 2009

The 2nd Beta of HandWave Adds Support
For Touch UI And Devices Without Front Cam

There's no denying that Samir Oueldi is a very talented developer with some creative and innovative ideas about controlling the user Interface of the S60 devices through the accelerometer based technology and motion based gestures.

He has worked on a variety of motion based applications including the software like ShakeMe, RotateMe, NokMote and ShutUp and the highly anticipated HandWave which makes use of the phone's front camera for gesture based control interface!

Now with the release of the HandWave second BETA Samir goes a step further by adding support for the touch UI and devices without front camera.

• Better compatibility: Will work on almost all S60 phones (3rd, 3rd FP1, 3rd FP2, 5th edition...). Work also on phones without front camera.
• Improved algorithm for the handwave detection.
• Viewfinder can be removed.
• Will work now on landscape orientation but with bugs (viewfinder not rotated, inverted controls on some phones...)
• Sensibility settings merged into one setting, with slider.
• Zoom setting added
• French and romanian language added (if you want to translate the app in your language please contact samir on skype)
• Icon changed: Now it will be visible on dark or light color theme

Of course, this is not the first product that uses the camera technology and an advanced image processing algorithms to utilize the phone camera together with user hand movements and translate them to commands that control the UI. But as far as I know HandWave is the first one that uses the front camera and provides effortless and touchless interaction with digital content through natural hand gestures.

HandWave breaks down traditional barriers between people and technology, changing the way people interact with all kinds of everyday information and it is actually a huge departure from graphical user interface into the world of Natural user interface.

This is the great idea in my personal opinion because it finally brings some practical use to the pretty much useless front camera because most of the users aren’t interested in making a video call or taking blurry self-portrait photos with the crappy VGA camera.

Application actually detects the hand movement and direction and allows you to control your phone, scrolling through photos, switching between tracks in the music player and so on. In a matter of fact it replaces the d-pad and is fully capable to control anything. Sensor sensitivity and the limit of imagination is the only barrier to what this technology can do and in synergy with the TV out it definitely has a huge wow potential!

So here it is, the second application developed under the AikonLab project. Get it, test it and don't forget to provide feedback and suggest improvement over at our forum section which is by the way official AikonLab's feedback channel and I am so proud because of that.

Oh yes, if you like this application, if you would like to support Samir then please consider a small donation to help with development for this and further projects.