The detection routine also seems to require a lot of juice. The demo program managed to soak up 64 percent of my Eee PC's 1.6GHz Atom CPU, and the video from the Webcam soon developed a disconcerting few seconds' lag that made controlling the onscreen cursors difficult at best.
Gestures and beyond
Doubtless these bugs will be ironed out in future releases of the SDK. But if they're showstoppers for you, Wasserman isn't actually the first to experiment with this type of UI. ARToolkit is a cross-platform library that can achieve many of the same things as the Touchless SDK.
Its focus is a little different, however. ARToolkit is billed as a means of enabling "augmented reality," in which real-life objects are enhanced with computer generated elements onscreen -- the first-down marker on Monday Night Football, for example. Because of this shift in emphasis, ARToolkit is more limited than Touchless in some important ways. It only supports square objects as markers, for example.
On the plus side, ARToolkit's code base seems much more mature than the Touchless SDK's. Its marker-recognition algorithm seems both more accurate and more efficient than Wasserman's version, and it registered fewer false positives. It's also portable to more environments than Touchless, which requires .Net 3.0.
Of course, neither of these toolkits can yet hold a candle to the magical gesture-based interfaces of Iron Man or Minority Report. Neither algorithm is advanced enough to register gestures made with bare hands, for starters -- both require some form of easily recognized marker. But they're a start.
Better yet, they're both open source, which means anyone can help to make them better. And even in their present forms, these libraries hold exciting possibilities for desktop application developers, particularly in the area of UIs for computer users with limited mobility. Check 'em out and let me know what you think.
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