Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

Hi Guys,

Being linux n all and considering our N900's have a front facing camera.

What do you think about the chances would be of a cool feature where the camera was on and to move desktops etc you could use hand gestures?

IE: wave your hand from right to left and the screen would slide right to left?

Just wondered if it would be possible or if anyone has seen talk about this before?

That would really PISS off the apple monkeys saying that their touchscreen is better.

We could turn round and say, well.. we dotn even need to touch ours!

/Giggity

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

A totally out there idea but I like the sound of it. I wonder if its even possible. I bet if it is someone on here has an idea on how it will work :-)

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

Well, its definately possible on many different PC applications and a couple of flash web sites.
so I think its just a matter of connecting to the camera, and porting the code from the PC applications of flash web sites to maemo.

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

I can imagine it would be possible, would be pretty awesome to have a N900 variant of "project natal" would need customised applications to really take advantage of it, though Media Player, Ovi Maps, Camera, Conversations would all allow for at least partial control of the handset.

Then again, does a Touch-Screen really require that sort of function? But then who cares, lets go f****in' crazy!

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

well ther are programs whitch use your eye for mouse control howabut chacking one of those ??????

or iwe seen (online) some contact lenses (bluetooth i think) could use the bluetooth to make it work .

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

There was a similar app developed by AikonLabs for Nokia s60 v3/v5

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

There are two major showstoppers for such an application
1) Front camera is extremely low res and complex movements are out of the option no matter of the processing power
2) Such an application is virtually useless in low-light mode (the camera already performs extremely badly in any non-brightly-lit environment)

Unfortunately, with given hardware, such an approach can only be a gimmick, hardly anything useful.

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

What about a method of finger input.

Say if the camera can pick up lines on your fingers, (dont press on the camera obv) give some space for lighting, you could pull your thumb down and have that with some cool virtual mouse :P.

Lol out of this world ftw ^^.

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

The res on the camera can barely recognise a human head let alone the lines on a finger.......

Correct about the poor resolution making any useful application worthless.......Most of the other applications that could be used are covered by the proximity sensor.

But still, would be a cool application to have and if set up it Could be of some use maybe in later applications.

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

i saw a youtbue video of a similar software just do that, i think it is for n95

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

Resolution of frontend camera is 640x480 (VGA), this is not much different from many of USB cameras. Most of face recognition/face tracking algorithms work on QVGA/VGA frame size to be fast and successful. That is if you could get noise level down to a reasonal degree.

However, camera consumes energy while it operates. Running it for long time is substantial power drain. Same goes for many other sensors like proximity, accelerometer and touch screen itself. Screen and touch screen consume majority of energy in N900 when they are active, btw.

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

Just curios, what kind of knowledge is required to progrram this kind of app? I have never programmed any app that interact with a camera let alone recognize image patterns. So i'd like to know where to look. I might work on this app :P

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

yes.!
i hv seen this. I had n95 8gb bfre n900....and thre was an app which does exactly the same. It workd with gallery, music player, and every other menu.!
i just had to wave my hand frm right to left fr the next image, or from top to bottom for the next track..!

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

Hmm thats a shame, what about putting a big black dot on your thumb?

(Im also quite serious about this..lol).

I'd imagine the camera quality would be mainly effected by lighting if its very low res?

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

Hmm... mostly useless... okay... except, we could use it for fast scrolling in the webbrowser. (up and down)

Activate the "Sensor" with press and hold the camera button (only focus) and swipe over the camera up or down with your finger. It should be very easy to recognise such a gestue. :)

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

Will it be possible to ever replace the front camera?

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

Now thats an idea i would actually like to see happen :).
Although having the camera on for rediculously long periods of time would be silly, we'd have to fix it to apps.

It'd work with left or right most likely too (If browser pages are outside of the screen etc.) even on strategy games it may be worth it (As ports progress that is :) ).

I would definately make apps if i knew how but at the moment im a linux virgin until i get the device! Then i will study thoughrilly the guides! :D.

Re: Use camera for control rather than touch screen.
 

I had seen the video - where a hand gesture in fromt of the front-facing camera can stop the music player or start it, open a new task or close a task etc - all with hand gestures.

I think you are talking about this implementation
http://www.symbian-addict.com/2008/0...with-hand.html

Ps: The video seems to have been removed.