A new report by ABI Research forecasts that, by 2017, over 600 million smartphones will have vision-based gesture recognition features.
Vision-based gestures are physical movements that are picked up by a camera or other sensor and converted into commands. ABI Research says gesture recognition technology adds another dimension to human's interactions with devices.
ABI Research senior analyst Josh Flood says: “Gesture recognition is a very exciting prospect, particularly for smartphones and tablets. These devices are already heavily entrenched into people's lives and another communication interface is always very welcome.”
While camera-based gesture recognition is already in use in products such as the Xbox Kinect and PlayStation Eye, ABI says there are still several challenges for the introduction of such technology in mobile devices.
Potential stumbling blocks include the issue of high power consumption, the effectiveness of the technology in adverse light conditions and variations in the background. “However, it is believed these problems can be overcome with different tracking solutions and new technologies,” says ABI.
“These tracking solutions give smartphone OEMs and app designers some attractive techniques for new interactions and enhancing the user's experience. Additionally, gesture recognition will be useful for media tablets, portable media players, and portable game players. It is projected a higher percentage of media tablets will have the technology than smartphones.”
New UI trend
The shift towards more natural user interfaces (using voice, motion and touch) was a key trend at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Consumer Electronics Association analyst Shawn DuBravac declared 2012 as “The Year of the Interface” predicting that more devices and applications will be getting voice and/or gesture-driven UIs.
Some of the new interfaces demonstrated at CES included the first eye-controlled laptop from Tobii Technology and the inclusion of facial, gesture and voice recognition technology in the latest smart TVs from Lenovo, Samsung and LG.
At the end of last year, Texas Instruments (TI, a major supplier of chips for mobile handsets) said it would power Microsoft Kinect-like gesture recognition in phones in 2012.
While it is acknowledged that gesture-based controls may seem unnecessary for mobile devices that are almost always kept in hand, TI argues for various use cases - such as when driving or other instances in which the user may need to interact with the device from a distance.
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