Holographic Raman Tweezers Controlled by Hand Gestures and Voice Commands

Abstract

Several attempts have appeared recently to control optical trapping systems via touch tablets and cameras instead of a mouse and joystick. Our approach is based on a modern low-cost hardware combined with fingertips and speech recog-nition software. Positions of operator's hands or fingertips control the positions of trapping beams in holographic optical tweezers that provide optical manipulation with microobjects. We tested and adapted two systems for hands position detection and gestures recognition – Creative Interactive Gesture Camera and Leap Motion. We further enhanced the system of Holographic Raman tweezers (HRT) by voice commands controlling the micropositioning stage and acquisi-tion of Raman spectra. Interface communicates with HRT either directly by which requires adaptation of HRT firmware, or indirectly by simulating mouse and keyboard messages. Its utilization in real experiments speeded up the operator's communication with the system cca. Two times in comparison with the traditional control by the mouse and the key-board.