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

Think your body's a temple? Turns out it's actually just the antenna the temple's staff uses to watch football when they're done praying. A group of engineers from Microsoft Research showcased a technology at Vancouver's Conference on Human Factors in Computing that offers gesture-based control on a scale that could make the company's Kinect controller downright laughable. The team demonstrated how it could harness the human body's reception of electromagnetic noise to create gesture-based computer interaction that does away with the need for a camera -- though a receiver isworn on the body (the neck, in this case). The system uses the unique signals given off in different parts of the home to help measure the interaction, effectively turning one's walls into giant control pads, which can regulate things like lighting and the thermostat. Hopefully games, too, because we can't wait to playPac-Man with our bedrooms.




Touch sensing and computer vision have made human-computer interaction possible in environments where keyboards, mice, or other handheld implements are not available or desirable. However, the high cost of instrumenting environments limits the ubiquity of these technologies, particularly in home scenarios where cost constraints dominate installation decisions. Fortunately, home environments frequently offer a signal that is unique to locations and objects within the home: electromagnetic noise. In this work, we use the body as a receiving antenna and leverage this noise for gestural interaction. We demonstrate that it is possible to robustly recognize touched locations on an uninstrumented home wall using no specialized sensors. We conduct a series of experiments to explore the capabilities that this new sensing modality may offer. Specifically, we show robust classification of gestures such as the position of discrete touches around light switches, the particular light switch being touched, which appliances are touched, differentiation between hands, as well as continuous proximity of hand to the switch, among others. We close by discussing opportunities, limitations, and future work.


Microsoft