Great video showing a bizarre and novel way of creating a gesture based interface. You literally touch nothing….Air…..and the interface does the rest. Pretty interesting project. According to Justin Schunick of the team at Northeastern University, the interface uses an array of copper electrodes to sense a certain change in the electric field created by the device. The black material covering the electrodes shows how the interface can be hidden beneath surfaces to create a completely invisible interface. It is simple black felt you can buy at any fabric store. The total cost of this prototype was around $60.00 USD.
They created custom software to communicate with the microcontroller running the show with C++. This enables the use of the device as a new type of XYZ computer mouse. Think nintendo wii controller without the controller — or minority report without the gloves. This can potentially be revolutionary as far as HCI goes.