A long-range touch interface for interaction with smart TVs

Abstract

A powerful interaction mechanism is one of the key elements for the success of smart TVs, which demand far more complex interactions than traditional TVs. This paper proposes a novel interface based on the famous touch interaction model but utilizes long-range bare hand tracking to emulate touch actions. To satisfy the essential requirements of high accuracy and immediate response, the proposed hand tracking algorithm adopts a fast color-based tracker but with modifications to avoid the problems inherent to those algorithms. By using online modeling and motion information, the sensitivity to the environment can be greatly decreased. Furthermore, several ideas to solve the problems often encountered by users interacting with smart TVs are proposed, resulting in a very robust hand tracking algorithm that works superbly, even for users with sleeveless clothing. In addition, the proposed algorithm runs at a very high speed of 82.73 Hz. The proposed interface is confirmed to comfortably support most touch operations, such as clicks, swipes, and drags, at a distance of three meters, which makes the proposed interface a good candidate for interaction with smart TVs. © 2012 ETRI.