Television control by hand gestures (Freeman 1994)

Summary:
This paper described a hand movement recognition system for controlling a television. The movements of an open hand were tracked and displayed to the user via a hand icon imposed on a secondary display, but which could overlay a television display in a more commercially viable prototype. The system captures images from a video camera which are downsampled to a 320 x 240 resolution. The images are processed on an HP 735 workstation which is connected via serial port to an All-In-One-12 remote control which can send commands to the television at a rate of about once per second. The recognition of the open hand trigger gesture takes about half a second. Once recognized, the hand position can be tracked at a rate of about five times per second. The images in the appendix were helpful in showing what the interface looked like and illustrating how background removal and local orientation video processing worked.

Discussion:
One scenario not covered in the paper was two users attempting to control the television simultaneously. The slider bar control interface for changing channels would not work well for a large number of channels because very fine control would be needed. A possible improvement would be to use a number pad or one slider per channel digit. The paper mentions that the users of the prototype system were excited, but I think it was due to the novelty of the system instead of an inherent fun factor. No results of the user study were given besides the fact that people seemed to enjoy using the system.