2009-2010-Karma Media Center

Touchless interaction: Karma MediaCenter Project

by Karsten Westra and Mark Scheeve

Nowadays almost everyone has a webcam. But how many actually use this webcam? And for what purpose, video conversation only? Our project wanted to provide people the possibility to interact with a computer system in a touch-less way by using their webcam. That’s why we chose to do a project which makes use of Microsoft Touchless SDK.

Because it is easy to recognize colored objects, we decided to make the finger and thumb tops colored. The big advantage of this, compared to infrared tracking, is that it is easy to distinguish the separate fingers from each other. The program tracks two points for each hand. The location of a pointer of one hand is between these two points, just a little closer to the thumb. This improved the pointer location when moving the finger and thumb closer. The »intensity« of a pointer gets higher when thumb and finger are closer.

The Karma MediaCenter is a demonstration of what could be an application of this technique. You are able to choose different songs by »clicking« them, which is done by putting your thumb and finger of one hand close enough to each other to click on the hand's location. It's also possible to set different playing speeds in the same way as song selection. The volume and time-line can be set by clicking on it with one hand while tilting the other to change the volume/point in time.