Speaker: Francis MacDougall, Senior Director, Gesture Technology, Qualcomm
Title: Touchless Gestures Go Mainstream
Abstract: Touch-free gestures are moving from the world of Xbox 360 Kinect games into mainstream devices including mobile phones, tablets, laptops, digital cameras and TVs. This talk reviews recently released products that incorporate gesture control and contrasts the various implementations of gesture control in each product. These initial products are starting to define a “gesture vocabulary” that could allow touch-free gestures to be ubiquitous across a wide range of devices. However, there is a danger of having conflicting gesture implementations on different devices that could cause consumer confusion and constrain the potential market. The talk also discusses the various technologies for detecting gestures as well as the leading use-cases, power-consumption issues, and complementary technologies that typify the next-generation user-interfaces enabled by gestures.
Speaker Biography: Francis MacDougall founded GestureTek in 1986 and was its CTO until its technologies, patents and engineering team were acquired by Qualcomm in June of 2011. Francis is now Senior Director, Gesture Technology at Qualcomm and leads the effort to release gesture technologies on Qualcomm platforms including the Snapdragon chip targeting smartphones, tablets and TVs. Francis holds several fundamental patents using both 2D and 3D sensors and tracking techniques in the gesture space and has licensed these patents to Sony and Microsoft for their use in game console platforms. His team’s software runs on tens of millions of devices worldwide.
Click here to access Francis’s slides.