Thursday, May 23, 2013: Now it’s time to bid adieu to touchscreen technology! Native of South Goa’s Velim, Andrea Colaco, has innovated a gesture-recognition based technology for mobile phones, which is all set to make touchscreen technology passe (currently in use these days).
The innovation, which provides real-time, millimetre accurate 3D gesture sensing on smart phones, would enable users to interact with their devices through thin air.
The young PhD student from South Goa recently won the MIT (Massachusetts Institute Technology) $100K entrepreneurship competition for her innovation. “What is the next interface for cellphone devices? It is gesture recognition. Every cellphone-device manufacturer is scrambling to bring gesture-recognition into their devices. This is an immediate and unaddressed market,” Andrea said.
According to a report by DNA, the innovation was presented at the competition as ‘3dim’ solution, set up by Andrea with co-founder Ahmed Kirmani. It achieves high-quality 3D sensing by employing patented signal processing methods invented at MIT by Colaco, co-founder Ahmed Kirmani, Vivek K Goyal and Rahul Tejwani.
“Now with the prize money, 3dim will go full steam. We will develop the technology for customers-smart-device manufacturers-who have already expressed interest in the product,” she said.
According to Colaco, the prototype just needs a few milliwatts of additional power from the mobile phone which is about one-seventh of the amount of power required by a standard smartphone camera.
