Gesture recognition deals and a micro-gesture future

We reported on Extreme Reality (XTR) about a year ago, as one of several gesture recognition start-ups that looked soon to be hot. Now it's been reported that XTR closed deals with both Samsung and NEC, for their technology to be used on those companies' computers.

As we said previously, Israel-based XTR's technology does work on mobile, but the company's focus is on webcam-equipped computers. Their technology delivers full-body gesture recognition, implemented fully in software, using standard camera technology. Both Samsung and NEC are reportedly using the technology for computers, not mobile phones.

So what will be next in gesture recognition? Other gesture recognition companies are likely to be in play soon, including software solution companies like EyeSight, 3D-camera-based middleware solution companies like Omek Interactive and LM3Labs, and CMOS companies like SoftKinetic.

Even more exciting to us, however, is the growing area of "micro-gestures" for mobile devices. Umoove’s technology focuses on the user’s face from a smartphone or tablet front-facing camera, and recognizes where the user’s eyes are looking and which way their head is tilted. PointGrab recognizes hands, both where they move and there they make a grabbing motion. Grizzly Analytics thinks that micro-gesture recognition, particularly for recognizing facial gestures and expressions, will be a growing area in 2013.

The trend appears clear - gesture recognition is a field which is on the move.

Intel demos indoor location technology in new Wi-Fi chips at MWC 2015

Intel made several announcements at MWC 2015, including a new chipset for wireless connectivity (Wi-Fi) in mobile devices. This new chipset, the 8270, include in-chip support for indoor location positioning. Below we explain their technology and show a video of it in action. With this announcement, Intel joins Broadcom, Qualcomm and other chip makers in moving broad indoor location positioning into mobile device hardware. The transition of indoor location positioning into chips is a trend identified in the newest Grizzly Analytics report on Indoor Location Positioning Technologies , released the week before MWC 2015. By moving indoor location positioning from software into hardware, chips such as Intel's enable location positioning to run continuously and universally, without using device CPU, and with less power consumption. Intel's technology delivers 1-3 meter accuracy, using a technique called multilateration, generating a new location estimate every second. While 1-

The year indoor location will truly take off

For years I've been writing sentences like "this will be the year that indoor location will explode into the market." I, and many others, have been expecting indoor location technology to enable the huge range of location-enabled apps, which currently work only outside where GPS signals are available, to work inside. But until now the promise of indoor location has remained a promise. But if we look at the reasons for this, we'll see that it is about to change. 2017 and 2018 are poised to be the years that the challenges keeping indoor location from going mainstream will be solved. First is accuracy. Most indoor location technologies until a year or so ago had accuracy in the range of 4 to 8 meters. This sounds good in principle, and in fact is better than GPS in many cases. But GPS systems are able to use road details to hide their inaccuracies, so that the blue dot seems to follow your driving car almost perfectly. But indoors, this sort of inaccuracy means y

Waze and Google Maps: A Quick Comparison

I've been a big Waze fan for years, relying on it to make my daily commute as quick as possible. I try to never leave my hometown without checking Waze first to avoid getting stuck in traffic. For those of you who don't know about Waze, they basically crowd-source traffic information, learning where traffic is slow by measuring how fast their users are moving. This traffic information is then used to route people in ways that will truly be fastest. (Apple has reportedly licensed Waze data for their upcoming maps app.) Waze is used most heavily abroad, and is only recently building a following in the States. (It was also just reviewed on the Forbes site .) So on a recent trip to the States, I decided to compare Waze to the latest USA-based version of Google Maps for Android. In a nutshell, I reached three conclusions. (1) Google's use of text-to-speech in their turn-by-turn directions is very nice. (2) Google's got Waze beat in terms of explaining what

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