Gesture Control

High-end augmented reality devices like the HoloLens and the Magic Leap 1, as well as the Ultraleap motion tracking modules, have demonstrated robust hand-tracking capabilities. However, many AR wearables (including Magic Leap) still rely on handheld controllers for interactio ...more

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the smartest of them all? Since Max Braun's Medium post went viral back in January of 2016, smart mirrors have been appearing on tech blogs in all shapes and sizes. Some are technically sound, some incredibly easy, but all are visually compel ...more

Amongst the trove of high-end features on the Galaxy S5, the display may be the most impressive. Sporting a 5.1-inch Full HD Super AMOLED (Samsung's version of OLED) display with 1920 x 1080 resolution and 432 pixels per inch, Samsung's flagship has one of the best smartphone ...more

For a long time now, VLC has been the go-to media player for Windows and Mac — but it's fast becoming the best third-party video player on Android and iOS, too. Aside from its ability to play virtually any file type, one of VLC's best features on mobile is the fact that you ca ...more

YouTube has a couple of basic gestures: you can double tap each half of the video to skip forward or back ten seconds, and you can swipe down to minimize the video. But wouldn't it be more useful if there were gestures to control brightness and volume? Well, as with all things ...more

Looking back at my childhood in the '90s, I can't help but feel like I was deceived. Movies that took place in the "future," like in the year 2015, would showcase awesome technology. You know, self-driving or flying cars, hoverboards, and virtual displays controlled with hand ...more

Ever-shrinking bezels and disappearing hardware buttons make for good looking phones, but they also increase the need for gesture controls. Android Pie comes with seven new swipe gestures, but if you don't have the update yet (or find its default gesture options to be lacking) ...more

The Oculus Rift's virtual experiences become a little less immersive when you're barely moving in a chair with a headset on, playing on a gamepad—but you don't have to accept that reality anymore. Their special Touch controllers, which theoretically let the user explore the V ...more

The VLC Player app for Android has a really nice feature that allows you to adjust brightness and volume by sliding your finger up or down on the left or right side of your screen, respectively. It helps keep you immersed in the video while you're in full screen mode, since yo ...more

Remembering keyboards shortcuts can prove difficult, especially when there are so many to remember, not to mention that they differ from app to app. While tools like CheatSheet can make them easier to use, today I'm going to show you how to enter them without using your keyboa ...more

You can do many things on your Nexus 7 to make life easier, like auto-categorize photos and perform on-the-fly calculations, but one thing that you should really have is more swipe gestures. By adding custom swipe gestures, you'll be able to navigate your device better, skip m ...more

While Samsung's three-tabbed gesture controls are pretty intuitive, there's still a learning curve. By removing the buttons, you seemingly lose the ability to jump between apps with the quick switch gesture. I say seemingly since there's still a way, it's just not very obvious ...more

Thanks to Flutter, it's now possible to control the music on your computer simply by making a few hand gestures. The app is available for both Windows and Mac and uses your computer's webcam to monitor your hand movements. Through the use of a few simple hand movements, you ca ...more

The long rumored and recently leaked Amazon phone has finally been unveiled, and in the interest of branding, continues down the Fire line—the Amazon Fire Phone. You can check out the full reveal here (warning: it's long), but I'll take you through all the features that sets t ...more

The S Pen in the Galaxy Note 10 and 10+ has improved to make remote usage even easier. Controlling your phone with just the stylus is no longer a party trick, as you can now move around and take actions in both first-party and third-party apps. One of the best examples of this ...more

The sovereignty that's granted when we jailbreak our iOS 7 devices can only be described with one word—liberating. With this freedom comes countless themes and apps that let us manipulate our devices to really own them and turn them into something that is truly ours. Activato ...more

Windows 8 has been reimagined to take full advantage of touchscreen devices as the "future" of computing. A few years ago, touchscreen devices were super buggy and only played well with smartphones, but with the advent of the iPad and a ton of other tablets, touchscreen capabi ...more

I've already showed you how to magically unlock your Samsung Galaxy S3 with the simple wave of a hand, but why stop there? Sure, you could go out and purchase a Samsung Galaxy S4 so you have Air Gestures that let you control the lock screen, SMS, sound, wireless, and more. We ...more

So, you just updated to Android 10, ready to explore all of the new features Google has to offer. There's just one hiccup — those gesture controls everyone talks about? They don't work. In fact, the option is completely grayed out, taunting you from the get-go. What's going on ...more

A pair of organizations recognized companies working in augmented reality for their innovative technologies over the past week. Meanwhile, another company used augmented reality for a sector that is overdue for a technology makeover, while another company has developed new cam ...more

Well folks, the dream is coming to life. While we still may be a ways away from mind control, the team over at Thalmic Labs has created the Myo, and with it, the power of the Force comes to motion control, so long as you use it wisely. Video: . Myo is a gesture-control arm ban ...more

Leap Motion created gesture control for all sorts of things, including virtual reality, long ago, but developers must build in support for their tracking peripheral to use its full potential. As a result, they've created an "Interaction Engine" for Unity, the primary platform ...more

Although early attempts at consumer smartglasses have employed trackpads and handheld or wearable controllers for user input, its the gesture control interfaces of the HoloLens 2 and the Magic Leap One that represent the future of smartglasses input. A new machine learning mo ...more

While the automotive industry is moving towards adopting AR displays in future models, BMW is already shifting into the next gear with its vision of the technology. During the climax of its presentation at this week's CES 2020 in Las Vegas, the automaker unveiled its BMW i In ...more

The stock music player on the iPhone hasn't changed much since its inception. Sure, with the recent iOS 6 update the design became sleeker, but it's not really what you'd expect from a top of the line smartphone. And when I say "MEH," it isn't directed towards the Kendrick Lam ...more

With many office workers in the US being asked to work from home if their job allows, Magic Leap's customary updates for the Lumin OS and Lumin SDK brings some help to keep distributed workforces connected. Chief among the new features arriving with Lumin OS version 0.98.10 a ...more

Lover it or hate it, Android 10 is a big improvement over Android 9 Pie. Based on previous versions, most flagships released in the last two years will get Android 10, but the question is when. So while you wait for those cool new gestures, how about I show you an app that giv ...more

Before smartglasses makers can dream of taking smartglasses to mainstream consumers, they must first determine the right mix of form, function, and price that will drive customers to buy into what they're hoping to sell. Google's AI research team may have part of the solution ...more

This week's Magic Leap Lumin OS update contained a number of goodies, including iris authentication, and a way to stream to Twitch from the device. But one new feature really stood out to me, and that's voice control of the system's interface. Don't Miss: Magic Leap Used to ...more

Whether you're trying to become an influencer or just want to share better photos and videos, the best camera to start with is your smartphone. It is likely the only camera you always have on you and it's probably capable of excellent pictures and video capture. But with a lit ...more

During its presentation at Unite Berlin, Magic Leap gave attendees a crash course in developing experiences for Magic Leap One (ML1), we found out quite a bit more about how the device works and what we can expect to experience with the device. Alessia Laidacker, interaction ...more

In the tech world, when you're a small startup going up against the Goliaths and their massive marketing budgets, you're forced to find and produce something almost magical to help your product stand apart from the rest. And that's exactly what Occipital Inc. has done with the ...more

I already know what you're thinking: this guide is blasphemy. I am showing you how to turn a Galaxy Note 10 or 10+ into an iPhone 11 Pro Max. And while I'd usually agree with you, hear me out. How can you know you don't like something until you try it? So here is your way of t ...more

The Galaxy S10 has finally been revealed to the masses, and it certainly doesn't disappoint. As the flagship to herald the tenth anniversary of the venerable Galaxy S line, the S10 has kept popular and familiar design elements like the immersive Infinity Display while employin ...more

In the battle for best stock Android flagships, there are really only two choices: Google Pixel phones and OnePlus phones. Although the latter isn't true stock Android, it is impressively close and usually paired with more impressive hardware than the Pixel lineup. The latest ...more

In a surprising twist of expectation management, Magic Leap managed to not only ship but deliver the Magic Leap One I ordered on Wednesday by 4 p.m. PT on the same day. After spending about an hour with the headset running through set up and poking around its UI and a couple ...more

The last few weeks were fairly busy in the realm of augmented reality and remote meetings developments. Most of that activity was generated by some mammoth announcements from Snap and its Spectacles AR smartglasses, and Google, with its Project Starline experimental holographi ...more

Nobody could predict the success of Microsoft's Kinect, not even Microsoft themselves. So, it was quite a surprise when it ended up earning a Guinness World Record for fastest-selling consumer electronics device, and an even bigger surprise to see people buying one that didn't ...more

Video games and art have somewhat of a sticky relationship. Many video games have large teams of talented artists doing amazingly creative work, and yet the art community is only just beginning to utilize video games as art (sometimes). Perhaps if video games were shown not ju ...more

A woman from space that who has been dead hundreds of years has been resurrected on the internet and you're the IT assigned to fight the viruses attacking her. Child of Eden is a mesmerizing musical game, with fluid animations, great game play, and lots of replay ability. Pla ...more

Our hacked Kinect series has demonstrated amply how the Kinect is changing the worlds of business, art, medicine and robotics. But where does it go from here? That will be determined by the thousands of dedicated DIYers out there doing work like you've seen here over the last ...more

“On this day he had lived with that feeling, with death breathing right in his face like the hot wind from a grenade across the street, for moment after moment after moment, for three hours or more. The only thing he could compare it to was the feeling he found sometimes when ...more

Your voice is the key to unlocking many features on your iPhone. For example, you can ask Siri to send a text message to a friend, add items to a list, run a custom shortcut, or turn on your lights, but Apple does not allow you to unlock your iPhone with a Siri voice command. ...more

While it may not always be practical, controlling your smartphone with air gestures can be pretty awesome. I would bet that if someone in public saw you using gestures to maneuver through your device, they'd be pretty impressed—and also kind of creepy for watching you. With t ...more

The Home button on an iPhone does a lot. That's not necessarily news for anyone who's ever owned an iPhone with a Home button, but what you might not know is that it's capable of so much beyond the standard everyday functions. So if you have an iPhone 7, 8, or the new SE model ...more

If you've ever seen one of those Samsung commercials from about a year back, you know that the Galaxy S series of phones come with a feature that allows you to do certain things by making gestures in front of your screen. They call this feature Air Gesture, and it enables you ...more

There are times when physically interacting with your iPhone is less than ideal, like when you're cooking or driving. Fortunately, iOS 13 has you covered regardless of the circumstance you may find yourself in. With the new Voice Control feature, you can control pretty much ev ...more

|Choose Your View: Quick Bullet Points | Detailed Descriptions Android's newest major update is a special one — it's the tenth full version of the world's most commonly used operating system. The latest release, dubbed simply Android 10 (codename Android Q), was first showcas ...more

While Android 9.0 Pie introduced some significant changes to the core operating system, the feature most people will be talking about is the native gesture controls. By default, these gestures are disabled — but for those of us wanting to try to the future of Android, here's h ...more

Gestures are a big deal on an iPhone X, XS, XS Max, XR, 11, 11 Pro, and 11 Pro Max. Without a Home button on Apple's super-premium smartphones, several actions had to be mapped to gestures instead, which impacts other areas of the system such as the Control Center. One exampl ...more

It seems like gesture controls are all the craze these days. From camera-opening gestures to "Air Gestures", it's getting to the point where we hardly need to touch the screens on our phones to control them. With music players seemingly being left out in this recent trend, de ...more

Apple's iOS 13 has been available for beta testing since June, and the stable release pushed out to everyone on Thursday, Sept. 19. To help you make the most out of iOS 13 for iPhone, we've rounded up everything you'll want to know, whether a colossal feature, small settings c ...more

There's no denying that there are some seriously useful new features in iOS 11 for iPhone. But there's also no denying that Apple got a few things wrong with the latest iOS update, as well as left a few important features out. Some of the items listed below are things Apple b ...more

If you can't curb your TikTok obsession, at least make it more efficient by taking your hands out of the equation. So when you're eating breakfast, working on your computer, or using your hands for another non-TikTok task, you don't even have to touch your iPhone or iPad to sc ...more

In iOS, the Control Center is an easy way to toggle settings such as Wi-Fi, Do Not Disturb, and Low Power Mode. Its Android counterpart is called "Quick Settings," which provides much of the same functionality with a few bonuses. If you're curious about how this toggle menu wo ...more

The new and improved Side button, as well as a plethora of new swipe gestures, are responsible for picking up the slack left by the missing Home button on the iPhone X. If you're really missing that Home button, however, Apple's built-in AssistiveTouch tool can help you out by ...more