Viva Las Vegas! You Don’t Need Hands There

Photo credit: GillyBerlin

I like to drive using my hands and my feet in a kind of traditional way. That is, the hands control the steering wheel and occasionally help grind through the gears before trying to find a radio station which doesn’t get on my nerves. My feet then dance a little jig between the various pedals and all is good.

I mentioned gesture control a while back, but the closer it becomes to reality the more doubts I have about it. The idea is that you can take control of various things like your climate control, phone and car radio using gestures and voice commands. Maybe it is only a few steps from there to controlling everything which gestures.

Touch Control and One Armed Bandits

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas sounds like a pretty good event, doesn’t it? If I was going to go to some sort of show involving electronics for consumers I would choose somewhere with lots of casinos and Elvis impersonators.

Well, I didn’t just make up this show. It really happened in January, although as my VIP invite seems to have got lost in the post I can’t confirm whether there were any Elvii there.

Anyway, the show had all manner of gesture control stuff which you can control in unconventional ways. The main company showing this was Mercedes Benz, who have developed a system call DICE. It is still at the relatively early stage but it stands for Dynamic & Intuitive Control Experience and it could be the big breakthrough which lets us use our hands to control all sorts of things.

The electronics firm Hardman is also working on something like this and wants to let drivers use intuitive gestures which are easily recognised and differentiated. It has been said that the gestures we tend to already make we most welcome. If they want I’ll give them a few drawings of some of the hand movements I have made in the last week.

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