The Gesture Interface: Another Asian Smartphone Manufacturer Thinks It Makes Sense

Back in early November, I mentioned that South Korean cellphone manufacturer Pantech had begun augmenting some of its products with gesture interface capabilities, courtesy of the Embedded Vision Alliance's newest member, eyeSight Mobile Technologies. Add Chinese developer Huawei to the gesture interface supporter list; as reported at Engadget earlier today:

The company's North American research chief, John Roese, told Computerworld that he wants to allow "three-dimensional interaction" with devices using stereo front-facing cameras and a powerful GPU to make sense of the dual video feed.

The stereo camera angle is of particular interest. As I mentioned last week, one of the key differences between eyeSight and fellow EVA member Omek Interactive is that whereas the former company targets its implementations at relatively simple single-image sensor configurations, the latter's focus is on depth-cognizant camera configurations (including dual-sensor arrays).

It's not clear whose technology Huawei is planning on using; Omek's, some other third-party developer's, or its own homegrown algorithms. Nonetheless, if the dual sensors are already there for 3-D photography or videoconferencing purposes, it seems to make sense to leverage them for gesture recognition and other functions, too.