With the adjustable palm strap, it is easy to fit the Gest Glove on to any hand and you simply slip on the four moldable mounts on the fingers. The Gest Glove offers the best efforts so far for improving on the human-to-computer interface presently in use all over – the keyboard and mouse combination. The Glove provides gesture controls similar to those depicted in Minority Report. The Gest is a four-finger glove-like design from Apotact Labs, allowing control of a computer and mobile devices with hand movements.
Apotact Labs describes Gest as a digital toolkit with two components – the gesture controller to slip on to your hand, and an SDK or Software Development Kit to allow building new applications for the platform. The gesture controller has four moldable finger mounts and fits any hand because of its adjustable palm strap. With 15 distinct sensors on each hand, two Gests may allow typing on any surface. Each finger has the same standard magnetometer, gyroscope and accelerometer combination found in most smartphones, contributing to its controller’s finer precision and accuracy.
The Gest has software to allow sensing small movements. That allows the software to create a personalized model based on monitoring and learning the movements of a user’s hands. The software adapts to a user over time, with the model being unique to each user. According to Apotact Labs, Gest offers highly accurate and precise gesture control.
There are other gesture controls available in the market. One of them is the Myo armband manufactured by Thalmic Labs. This device utilizes extensive gestures from muscle-controls to control a large number of devices. Another is the Leap Motion controller, which is smaller. This device uses infrared cameras and rays to create a model from your hand movements. Compared to the above, the Gest Glove from Apotact Labs offers a higher degree of accuracy using smaller movements. That will certainly appeal to designers and artists looking for more precision.
For example, you can use the Gest Glove right out of the box, as it will come built-in with a five standard gesture library for use with the Adobe Photoshop. A twitch of a finger allows switching between apps. The mouse cursor moves along when you point your finger at the screen and move it. You can adjust the Photoshop sliders with a simple twist of your palm. If you have 3D objects on the screen, just grab them and rotate them in your hand – they will rotate on the screen as well.
Designers who do not want to use the skeletal models and motion-processed data custom-built into Gest, can access its raw sensor data. With the Java and Python APIs provided, designers can use the raw sensor data to create their own models. Future generations of the Gest may make use of a typing proof-of-concept being worked on at the Apotact Labs. This is likely to use a neural net to handle word prediction. The concept will use tow Gest Gloves, one on each hand, allowing the user to turn any surface into a keyboard. However, this is still in the experimental stages.
