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In some households, fighting over the TV remote is a raging nightly battle. In mine it’s more of a cold war detente. Either way, by the end of next year Hitachi (NYSE: HIT) may take the conflict to a whole new level. Working with Canesta and GestureTek, the Japanese electronics giant has created a line of television sets that will be able to recognize a viewer’s hand gestures. Instead of a remote control, you can just wave your hand in the right way to change channels or volume. Check out the video after the break to see Hitachi’s demonstration at CES from earlier this year.

From tablet PCs to iPhones, designers are giving us new ways to interact with our electronic devices. The future of the human-computer interface is likely to be much more tactile and intuitive than our current dependence on keyboard, mouse or remote control. With gesture controlled television, Hitachi and its partners aren’t just removing the necessity of a remote, they’re blurring the lines between the real world and the digital one.

Source: http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/29/new-hitachi-tv-controlled-by-gestures-video/

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Israel have developed a new hand gesture recognition system, tested at a Washington, D.C. hospital, that enables doctors to manipulate digital images during medical procedures by motioning instead of touching a screen, keyboard or mouse which compromises sterility and could spread infection, according to a just released article.

The June article," A Gesture-based Tool for Sterile Browsing of Radiology Images" in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (2008;15:321-323, DOI 10.1197/jamia.M24), reports on what the authors believe is the first time a hand gesture recognition system was successfully implemented in an actual "in vivo" neurosurgical brain biopsy. It was tested at the Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/buot-gid061508.php