The Hindu Business Line : Just wave at your PC

HP examines about 800 ideas every year; the company intends to graduate two commercial products (across its product lines) as part of its Innovation programme office.

Philip McKinney

Adith Charlie

Imagine logging on to the Internet by just waving to your personal computer. Or listening to music even without laying your hands on the keyboard? These things could soon become a reality, if technology multinational HP succeeds in achieving accuracy levels of 99.99 per cent in the R& D experiments that it is doing on gesture control technology.

If that is achieved, people can use simple hand gestures — such as the flick of a finger — in order to control the working of a computer.

“The computer will understand what you want to have done by the movement of your hands.

Hence, the user just needs to gesture in front of the device for it to respond,” Philip McKinney, Vice-President & Chief Technology Officer, Personal Systems Group; General Manager, Gaming Business Unit, told eWorld on the sidelines of the company’s product showcase event in Germany. This correspondent’s trip was sponsored by HP. For computers to recognise gestures, analysts feel that HP would use some software that endows a desktop or laptop with image-recognition powers.

The software would be helpful as long as the computer is powered on and has a line-of-sight to your hand. HP spends about $.3.5 billion annually on research and development (R&D), across all its business units.

Of the total dollars that the company has for its Personal Systems Group (PSG) group, 70 per cent is dedicated to core products such next generational notebooks and desktops.

The company has already managed to clock accuracy levels of 99 per cent in its gesture computing related R&D.

“The challenge is that going from 99 to 99.9 accuracy is ten times harder while achieving accuracy levels of 99.99 from 99.9 per cent is 100 times harder,” said McKinney.

HP examines about 800 ideas every year; the company intends to graduate two commercial products (across its product lines) as part of its Innovation programme office or IPO. The IPO has been designed and run by McKinney for bringing new idea to market.

“Today about 60 per cent ideas come from inside of HP, while 40 per cent comes from outside. Unlike many others, we accept ideas from anyone,” he said.

The IPO currently has about 50 projects in hand, across all of HP’s units.

adith@thehindu.co.in