PointGrab aims to create a motion-controlled smart home, but the home isn’t ready

• By James Plafke on December 17, 2013 at 11:07 am
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• Whenever advanced motion and gesture controls are discussed, Spielberg’s Minority Report is inevitably brought up. At this point, the movie’s motion control has been referenced so much, that it’s customary to reference how it’s always referenced. Rather than waxing poetic about the film, the Israel-based PointGrab is set to debut its new in-home motion and gesture control system that aims to make everything in your house controllable by pointing and swiping at it, including your computer.
  PointGrab’s motion and gesture tech has been around in a modern-day (though limited) capacity for three years. It included basic motion control in some laptops back in 2010 that responded to users holding their hands up in front of the computer’s webcam. By leaving the motion control of computer software to gadgets like the Leap Motion (and based on thefrustrating experience that is the Leap Motion, perhaps regrettably), PointGrab is targeting your home and the every day minutia of manipulating the objects within it.
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• You sit down on your couch after a long, hard day of work, kick off your shoes, and get ready to watch tonight’s game. You reach for the remote control, but realize it’s over by the TV. You begrudgingly get up, grab the remote, and sit back down to relax only to realize that, oops, you left the curtains open and the street light is glaring right onto the television screen. So, you once again get up to close the curtains, but after sitting back down you realize you left the foyer lights on. With PointGrab’s two products, PointSwitch and AirTouch, you could’ve just saved those few mediums of tedium and turned on the TV, closed the curtains, and shut off the foyer light without ever leaving the couch.

  With PointSwitch (seen above), the position of your eyes couples with the position and direction of your finger, and allows you to select an electronic household item and toggle its features. Select a lamp by pointing at it, then lower your hand to dim the lights. Point at your curtain and lower your hand, and that annoying street light will be blocked from view. AirTouch (seen below) grants you motion control from a distance over devices that have a complex interface, such as your television or computer. Shedding the shackles of your remote control, AirTouch allows you to turn on your television, write channel numbers in the air, and select and navigate various options simply by point and gesturing. Like PointSwitch, AirTouch aligns your eyes and finger in order to recognize the gesture.
• The technology shown off debuted at CES next month, but PointGrab will have many obstacles to overcome. Thanks to the Wii, Kinect, and PS Move last generation, we found out that motion control is tedious and tiring. Even if it works flawlessly, you still have to uncomfortably extend your arm in the air — and that doesn’t necessarily take into account the positions into which we contort ourselves when binging on TV. Can AirTouch recognize us when half our head is buried in a pile of pillows and the only part not hiding underneath a blanket is the arm we’re supposed to use to extend and point? Will wearing glasses confuse the sensor that aligns your finger with your eyes?
  Even if the system can perfectly detect your finger and eyes in every conceivable condition (lighting, your position, reflections, and so on), most people don’t live in an entirely smart home. Most of us have regular cloth curtains that sit on a plain metal bar. Not everyone has an expensive smart TV that has the menus and options to be manipulated by touch, or central air and heating controlled by a thermostat.
  Whether or not PointGrab’s tech works beautifully, it may not work with anything we currently own except our computers, which is the one device that wouldn’t be too useful to control from across the living room in most scenarios.
  Being able to control everything in your home with a casual and dismissive flick of the wrist is deeply desirable, becoming the remote control yourself and doing everything from the comfort of your favorite chair. We’ll see if PointGrab can achieve that (with what will likely require a complete upgrade of everything in your house) in January when the tech is shown off.
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