Facial recognition, gesture tech leads the way

Soon shopaholics may be able to browse the shelves of their favourite store just by looking through the front window.

The interactive shop window, produced by the Fraunhofer research organisation, is an interactive computer system that allows shoppers to discover more about products displayed in the shop window using gesture recognition.

Shoppers can point at products to view more detailed 3D models of the items on a screen and use gestures to explore the models and call up product information such as availability and price.

The position of the hands, face and eyes of the shopper are recorded by four cameras, and fed into the system's gesture-recognition software.

This digital map table system, produced by the Fraunhofer Institute, is designed to help officials plan major state or sporting events, or manage large policing or military operations.

The table displays a map, which in the CeBIT demo could be navigated by manipulating the touchscreen tabletop.

Users are able to explore specific areas of the map in more detail by placing a Fovea-Tablett — a customised tablet PC developed by the Fraunhofer research organisation — on top of the table.

The tablet can display a detailed, high-resolution image of the area under the tablet or highlight items of interest within the area. The tablet can also store the area of map underneath it, so it can be viewed away from the map table. Users can also set up the tablet to highlight various details.

People can also annotate the area of map displayed on the tablet and see those changes displayed on the digital map table.

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see Photos: Gesture controls, eye-tracking tech and facial recognition on silicon.com.

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