If you're located in or near Silicon Valley (or aren't, but have access to a computer), are interested in gesture-based user interfaces, and don't have any plans for tomorrow evening, this post is for you. The Bay Area SID (Society for Information Display) chapter sponsors monthly technical seminars on various display-related topics, for SID members and non-members alike.
The subject of the presentation scheduled for November 14 beginning at 6PM (please arrive early, as the doors are sometimes locked and unattended after the presentation begins) is "Touchless Gestures Go Mainstream." The presenter will be Francis MacDougall, Senior Director for Gesture Technology at Qualcomm. Here's his bio:
Francis MacDougall founded GestureTek in 1986 and was its CTO until its technologies, patents and engineering team were acquired by Qualcomm in June of 2011. Francis is now Senior Director, Gesture Technology at Qualcomm and leads the effort to release gesture technologies on Qualcomm platforms including the Snapdragon chip targeting smartphones, tablets and TVs. Francis holds several fundamental patents using both 2D and 3D sensors and tracking techniques in the gesture space and has licensed these patents to Sony and Microsoft for their use in game console platforms. His team's software runs on tens of millions of devices worldwide.
Here's the abstract of what MacDougall will be discussing:
Touch-free gestures are moving from the world of Xbox 360 Kinect games into mainstream devices including mobile phones, tablets, laptops, digital cameras and TVs. This talk reviews recently released products that incorporate gesture control and contrasts the various implementations of gesture control in each product. These initial products are starting to define a "gesture vocabulary" that could allow touch-free gestures to be ubiquitous across a wide range of devices. However, there is a danger of having conflicting gesture implementations on different devices that could cause consumer confusion and constrain the potential market. The talk also discusses the various technologies for detecting gestures as well as the leading use-cases, power-consumption issues, and complementary technologies that typify the next-generation user-interfaces enabled by gestures.
The seminar will take place here:
Texas Instruments/National Semiconductor
Building 9
Classroom 4
3693 Tahoe Way
Santa Clara, CA 95051
Head here to register in advance.
If you're unable to attend in person, a live webcast will also be available via GoToWebinar (note that archives of already-concluded seminars are only available to SID members):
To register for the SID Global Webinar, go here. For assistance with the webinar, please contact Doug Bragdon ([email protected]). Please verify that your system works with GoToWebinar in advance.
