With a wristband designed by researchers from Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, the future of wearable technology is bright. The wristband, called FingerTrak, can track the entire human hand in 3-D space,
...including 20 finger joint positions, using three or four miniature, low-resolution thermal cameras that read contours on the wrist.
This device could be used in various fields such as sign language translation, human-robot interaction, and virtual reality.
"This was a major discovery by our team—that by looking at your wrist contours, the technology could reconstruct in 3-D, with keen accuracy, where your fingers are," said Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science and director of Cornell's new SciFi Lab, where FingerTrak was developed. "It's the first system to reconstruct your full hand posture based on the contours of the wrist."
FingerTrak's breakthrough is a lightweight bracelet, allowing for free movement. Instead of using cameras to directly capture the position of the fingers, the focus of most prior research, FingerTrak uses a combination of thermal imaging and machine learning to virtually reconstruct the hand. The bracelet's four miniature, thermal cameras—each about the size of a pea—snap multiple "silhouette" images to form an outline of the hand.
More details about this amazing gadget over at TechXplore.
(Image Credit: Sambeetarts/ Pixabay)