Upcoming Trends: Gesture and Full Body Remote Control

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Written by Rejean Bourgault (Canada); Edited by Olivier Adam (Singapore), Co-founders of 5Deka Inc. – All Rights Reserved

For the past year, we have been predicting that Gesture Remote Control will become a big innovation in both gaming and everybody’s life. Earlier in 2009, at the Electronic show in Asia, Gesture Based remote control started to get some attention; with as an example of an application being a remote control for your television set. Where your open hands mean, “turn on the TV”, your closed hands mean “turn off the TV”, thumbs up means change the channel, etc.

In Video Games, the Wii from Nintendo is a form of Gesture remote control, but it is still in its infancy state. A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced its Project Natal for the Xbox 360 video game console; using cameras and full skeletal mapping to track user movements. You could imagine playing tennis in a Virtual world, without any remote control, just by doing the movement of playing tennis, same for any sports or even driving a car. There isn’t a need anymore for having a device in your hands.

We strongly believe that after the era of gesture and skeletal mapping, the next move in the industry will be full immersion, where in addition to the movement track, bio sensor will monitor your body, including temperature, heart rate, etc. One way to reach full immersion will be to wear a full body immersion suit.

Gesture remote control, Skeletal mapping, Full immersion are all kind of tools, used to augment the reality, basically the zone where pure reality as we know today and Virtual Reality overlap.

As we describe in “a year in 2050”, you could imagine, in the future, doing a Walt Disney Monster ride sitting in your living room in a full body immersion suit, and where at the other end, another person or a Robot transmit over the network all the sensations you would be getting if you were physically there. Transmitting the view, the heart rate, sensations, etc. Think about people who are sitting in a wheel chair or in a hospital who might never have the chance to visit a Walt Disney Theme Park in person. The Walt Disney experience will come to them instead...