WATCH out Nintendo, here comes the Wii-killer from Singapore.
A team of researchers from the Institute for Infocomm Research have come up with a new way to play video games without any controllers at all - just using their bare hands.
The team showed a prototype of their technology in action through a DJ music game on a laptop with an attached camera. The PC was also connected to a flat TV for better display.
In the game, the gamer waves his hands up and down to mimic the on-screen virtual DJ's turning of the music-mixer knob.
It's a bit like Guitar Hero 3 except you are simply waving your hands in the air.
Called real-time gesture tracking, the technology consists of a camera which detects the user's face and hands.
When the user moves his hands in response to the screen prompts, the camera reads the moves and relays the signals to the image recognition software in the laptop which then tracks the movements in 3D.
The software can also be used to control a spaceship in a game using your hands.
You can push your hands forward to move it forward, right to move it right and even make it pitch, roll and yaw.
Dr Farzam Farbiz, the lead researcher of the project, said: "Our technology can be used for the next-generation of video games as well as for interactive advertising billboards offering immersive experiences."
So it can be used at popular attractions like museums and science centres for interactive displays.
But gaming is perhaps where the big bucks lie.
Wii, with its motion-sensor technology has been selling faster in the US than its competitors - the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.
While the Wii also uses motion-detection technology for its realistic gameplay, it is detecting the movements in the Wii-mote game controller.
This new technology brings gaming to the next level of realism because now the sensor simply detects human hand motion.
The real-time tracking system joins a score of other made-in-Singapore technologies from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*star) which will be on show from today till Friday at the annual Infocomm Media Business Exchange (imbX) trade show at the Singapore Expo.
Exploit Technologies - the commercialisation arm of A*star - will take the opportunity to look for interested vendors who are willing to purchase or license the homegrown solutions.
Another interesting technology showcased is the patent-pending TwinUSB stick which looks like two USB sticks stuck together - one marked with "+" and the other with a "-" (right).
But don't be fooled, the TwinUSB is not just two storage sticks attached to each other. It is in fact a unique solution for users to securely access their files in their home PC while they are at work on the office PC.
Here's how it works:
At home, insert the TwinUSB into a standard USB port in your computer. Now select the files you want to "bring to your office" by simply dragging them from your hard disk to the TwinUSB drive icon.
Now unplug the "-" stick (while leaving the "+" stick in the home PC) and plug it into the office computer's USB port. You will now "see" your files and be able to drag them from the stick into the office PC.
All of this feels just like using the standard USB sticks but there is a huge difference. The files actually never physically leaves the hard disk of your home PC.
When you "copied" the files over to your office PC, the "-" stick connected back to your home PC via the Internet to copy the file over to your office PC.
So why go through all the bother when using a typical USB stick would do the same trick?
Lakshminarayanan, the creator of the TwinUSB, explained that when the two sticks are attached, they actually generate a secret 160-bit key which only the two of them knows. So the TwinUSB solution is really a secure way to remotely access a file.
"Think of it as an infinitely long invisible cable connecting the home PC to the remote PC," he said.
This article was first published in The Straits Times, Digital Life on 17 June 2008.
