While Emily has been at TED this last week, those left at home have been pushing the envelope too,  we've been having a go at gestural input for an exhibit that we'll be showing at WEBSTOCK later this month.

In typical Kiwi style we made our own Infra-Red LED array to illuminate an area (thanks to Steph who is now an expert solderer, and is wanting to learn more about electronics!)

We then use Nintendo Wii remote to scan the area and pick up any Infra-Red signals reflected back off objects moving in the space,

So the office is littered with all kinds of trial reflecting objects, bike relectors/saftey tape, etc etc.

The technology in the Wii remote is very clever for such a consumer product. - an Infra-Red camera with 'Blob tracking' in hardware that can track 4 objects simultaneously, at about 100 frames per second. there's an accelerometer to record movement, and  a Bluetooth connection to send the signals back to the main unit, or in our case to a PC. (All in all, an experimenters delight!)

How are we doing it? We get people to wear a small pad of silver reflective tape on their fingers, and so far we can detect simultaenous occurances of gestures such as linear strokes, and linked movements like 'W' and 'V' and even circles in the air!  

We may not be making the first foot prints in the snow, but the foot prints we can see are still warm.