Navigating a 3D Scene by Waving Your Arm

[Andrew Davison]

Dear All,

I've just added a new example to the Killer Game Programming in Java site at http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/.

Chapter 28.8 (near the bottom of the page) is about navigating through a simple 3D world by moving and rotating your arm (no keyboard or mouse manipulation is needed).

The example uses JMF to capture images from a webcam, and basic image processing to generate navigation commands.

Comments are appreciated.

- Andrew

[Vorax]

Very interesting.

That's a pretty good solution to the problem.  Simple, inexpensive and if you break the strap you could have your kids make another one for you

The thing it's lacking though is one more command to initiate an action.  Perhaps you could have a glove with a green circle/square on the back of the hand that the user can flash in front of the camera to initiate an action or something like that.

[Andrew Davison]

Vorax,

There's quite a few bits of information that can be extracted from the wrist band approach -- there's three colours, and movement in the left/right, up/down directions. There's also the absence of the wrist band from the image, and timing data (e.g. how long the glove is missing from the webcam snaps).

Combinations of these can potentially give you quite a wide set of command options. The drawback is accuracy. For example, I found it quite hard to keep my arm level, so code that used the vetical position of the arm might be unreliable.

- Andrew

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[Alfryd]

Umm... I might be completely wrong here, but wouldn't this be prone to Gorilla-arm syndrome?  I mean, that kinda killed off touch-screens.