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Recognizing Characters Written in the Air

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Write with Air is being touted as a way to input characters into devices (such as the Xbox) equipped with a low-cost Webcam but no keyboard or mouse. Simply face the camera and write the intended letter or word in the air by using your finger or an object – even an apple! The gestures captured by the camera will be fed into a handwriting recognizer.

During the demo, a regular webcam was used and a plain old apple from the grocery store. The software isn’t available yet, and is still a prototype. It looks good to me! It’s an amazing piece of research and software.

Currently, the software recognizes the Chinese, Japanese and English languages. The researchers used an orange and even a bouncy ball to write in the air – and projected the words on the screen.

Can you even imagine when this is available? All of us Xbox gamers will be all over this software!

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6 Comments

i have seen many youtube videos of Johnny Chung Lee, Carnegie Mellon University, that does similar things except with a wii remote. More info. on http://johnnylee.net/

thats pretty cool very good prototype
iv seen one like that that can be used in games like a plaster on your finger is the mouse and you make a trigger movement with another finger to fire

Now tablet-style games can be ported to the Xbox Live Arcade to use along with the Xbox Vision Camera. This will be great for educational games for young ages too.

That Webcam resembles the QuickCam Fusion.

Michael Primiani

March 1st, 2009
at 6:35am

It looks really good but you should be able to use your finger…..Also, why didnt he write something in english?

Nice! This could be useful to people who have disabilities.

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