Over the last year, we?ve seen companies move us ever closer to using our eyes, hands, and voice to control our computers. Now Intel hopes to develop an integrated solution for their products that pulls from all of these developing technologies. They call it perceptual computing.
Facial recognition software, voice commands, eye tracking, and gesture controls are all individual systems that have been slowly evolving for some time now. While voice commands and facial recognition are fairly popular today, eye tracking and (non-touch) gesture controls have been making headlines as well. These latter two offer new input paradigms while will inevitably gain popularity over time ? the ability just glance at the icon you want to click and watch as the program opens is quite appealing, while Microsoft?s Kinect has made it clear that gestures are useful for input.
Intel?s goal moving forward is to offer a comprehensive suite of perceptual computing tools that will make ultrabooks and ultrabook convertibles future proof.
When you think about hand gestures (again, without touching the display) most people think about the Kinect and the upcoming Leap Motion tracker. The idea behind these is to have multiple sensors recording the position of your hand in a 3D space, and then use that information to control the sytem. Instead of touching the screen and swiping from left to right, you just reach out and wave your hand through the air. We?ve seen this kind of interaction work with Kinect, and with Leap Motion being included in ASUS laptops in the future Intel has chosen to invested heavily in competing technology. Developers are currently testing software on a USB-powered 3D camera that offers motion tracking, but Intel hopes to have this tech embedded in ultrabooks to provide this immersive experience.
Intel?s partnership with Nuance has given the company the ability to mold a voice command system of their very own. The Nuance software has been used to interpret human language commands, instead of specific commands. This puts Intel?s voice control system in line with services like Google Now and Apple?s Siri, only on it will be focused on the PC (at least initially, given Intel?s growing interest in mobile).
Intel wants users to be able to launch apps, seamlessly post messages to social media, search the web, and eventually put the computer to sleep or wake it up with a customize-able voice command. Nuance is a driving force behind a lot of voice command technologies right now, including iOS? Siri, which helps identify what to expect from this service.
Facial recognition and eye tracking software open a lot of interesting doors for security and usability in traditional laptops. Facial recognition has been a pipe dream for years, but the ease in which the software can be tricked by a photo or video has stymied the adoption of the technology.
Intel?s use of a 3D camera and anti-spoofing techniques that include muscle measurement and 7-point confirmation hopes to make this technology more viable moving forward. Because the camera is already paying pretty close attention to your face, there?s a push to look at eye tracking as well. As the camera focuses on your eyes, where you are looking on the screen becomes the position of the mouse. As you move around with your eyes, even if you?re moving your head around, the camera and screen work together to keep the mouse in place.
Right now, all of this technology is dependent on external accessories. It?s been a while since most people have felt the need to strap a camera to the top of their laptop screen, but Intel assures us that this is only for development purposes. Once the technology has been embedded into the increasingly slimmer form factors of an ultrabook, these perceptual computing features will become standards that will change how we use computers. Intel has an fascinating vision for the future of interacting with the PC, and this combination of technologies creates a functional gap between smartphones and PC?s.
Source: http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/a-look-at-intels-perceptual-computing-future-2013018/
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