In recent years, gesture recognition has become the must-have technology, especially among Israeli companies. After PrimeSense’s success with the incorporation of its technology into Microsoft’s Kinect controller, many similar companies, such as Eyesight, PointGrab, Omek Interactive and uMoovehave raised their heads. However, all the aforementioned companies are still a few steps behind a major break.
Related articles
Another company, which has been operating in that field even before Israelis knew what PrimeSense was, is XTR3D, AKA Extreme Reality. The company, founded over four years ago by Dor Givon (CTO), started out as a developer of hand-gesture recognition using standard cameras, but during the past year, has changed direction towards full body recognition using standard 2D cameras.
With $14 million in the bank, raised from Cresent Point Lantern, Texas Instruments and SV Angel, and signed deals with giants such as Samsung, Heier and NEC, Extreme Reality’s future couldn’t be brighter.
No complicated hardware needed
Unlike existing products on the gesture recognition market, XTR3D’s solution doesn’t require specific hardware and relies solely on a single 2D camera. The company’s software can use the camera to track the entire body and translate gestures into computer commands. In fact, it would be wrong to call Extreme Reality’s solution “gesture recognition,” since unlike PointGrab and Eyesight’s solutions, which track movement using changes in the background, XTR3D’s solution uses full skeleton-mapping, similar to PrimeSense, only without using any special hardware.
Last month, Samsung launched a simple dancing game called Pandamania on the Windows 8 app store, as part of the exclusive cooperation with XTR3D. The game, which can be downloaded and played on Samsung’s Windows 8 tablet, gives us a first glance at the company’s new technology.
After experimenting with the company’s technology at the 2013 CES exhibit, and in comparison to dozens of hours using the Kinect controller, Israeli website Newsgeek says that Extreme Reality’s solution is very impressive when it comes to accuracy. Even though the testers were able to recognize some instances in which the software couldn’t recognize a gesture done at a certain angle or speed, keep in mind that all they use is a 2D camera, so there’s no doubt that their product can move the field of gesture recognition a major step forward.
…
To read this article in Hebrew, click here.
Via newsgeek
Photo by XTR3D
