Microsoft Research
Computational User Experiences

Humantenna:
Sensing Gestures Using the Body as an Antenna

Computer vision and inertial measurement have made it possible for people to interact with computers using whole-body gestures. Although there has been rapid growth in the uses and applications of these systems, their ubiquity has been limited by the high cost of heavily instrumenting either the environment or the user. In this paper, we use the human body as an antenna for sensing whole-body gestures. Such an approach requires no instrumentation to the environment, and only minimal instrumentation to the user, thus enabling truly mobile applications. We show robust gesture recognition with an average accuracy of 93% across 12 whole-body gestures, and promising results for robust location classification within a building. In addition, we demonstrate a real-time interactive system which allows a user to interact with a computer using whole-body gestures.

 

This work is partially supported by Microsoft Research Connections.

 

Project Team

Video


Download video: [wmv, 35MB] [mp4, 42MB]

Publications

Humantenna: Using the Body as an Antenna for Real-Time Whole-Body Interaction

Gabe Cohn, Dan Morris, Shwetak Patel, Desney Tan

To appear in the proceedings of ACM CHI 2012, May 2012

Your Noise is My Command: Sensing Gestures Using the Body as an Antenna

Gabe Cohn, Dan Morris, Shwetak Patel, Desney S Tan

Proceedings of ACM CHI 2011, May 2011 (Best paper award)

Press

Remote Control, With a Wave of a Hand

The New York Times, 10 September 2011

How to Make a Human Antenna (at ABC News) (at MSNBC)

Discovery News, 12 May 2011

Turn your entire home into a game controller

New Scientist, 10 May 2011

Talking to the Wall

Technology Review, 3 May 2011

Contact

Contact Dan Morris and Desney Tan for questions about our work in this area.


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