Camera on your phone has many feature like face recognition, anti-shake, zoom, red-eye reduction and other cool functions built-in to your handset. But beyond taking higher quality pictures or shooting better movies, there’s not much else you can do with the camera in your phone.
Well, this will change soon. There’s already quite powerful image processor chip inside your phone. Knowing that, Sony Ericsson had a brilliant idea. Recent Sony Ericsson patent application could make ‘em a bit more worthwhile. The patent describes a scenario where a user could input commands by simply gesturing in front of the lens, and the phone would then be able to decode certain actions and react accordingly. Apparently, one could answer a phone (in handsfree fashion, of course) from across the room with just a flick of the wrist, and tracks streaming over Bluetooth could be controlled by waving your hands like you just don’t care. Granted, users would still have to be where the handset could see them, but aside from that, the idea’s not too shabby.
What if they would add some clever software that is able to analyze incoming images and recognize some of them? For example this software could recognize the hand gestures. Then they could map different hand gestures to different control commands on the phone. E.g. “pointing finger up” is associated with “start mp3 player” command, “thumb to the right” equals “fast forward”, etc;.
Now, as long as the camera remains active, you can remotely control your phone without any additional device. Just wave your hand and it knows what to do.
No need to rush to make it to the group photo in 5 secs, after making sure everything looks right in a viewfinder. Get comfortably among your friends, make a gesture, and the phone knows that your are ready for a quality group picture.
The phone rings and you are in the other side of the room? Use another preset hand gesture and your phone answers the call in a “hands free” operation mode.
Your Sony Ericsson phone can also be connected to your DLNA enabled network and operate as a wireless remote control for other things, like your big plasma TV, video&music library on your PC, stereo system, etc. And now you can control all of this sitting on your sofa, by just waving your hand.
With a wave of your hand you’ll be able to turn on/off your TV, increase/decrease music volume on your stereo, launch movies, view picture libraries, skip songs and do many other things.
Well, it is just a patent application for now. But idea itself is very simple, brilliant and doesn’t require any additional hardware, beyond the chips that are already in the phone. So don’t be surprised if we’ll see it implemented in Sony Ericsson phones pretty soon.
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