原创 Gesture interface design issues and opportunities

One certainty about the domination of the computer industry by personal computer is that it was – and continues to be – a major market for embedded device hardware and software. In addition to the x86 that powers the operating system, the desktop PC is the home to at 8 to 12 or more MCUs embedded in the system that manage all the various user interface and communications operations.

And as the world has gone mobile, portable and wireless, the same is true of the many smartphones, tablets, and ultrabooks that inhabit our lives. In such connected computing devices, for every 32bit ARM or Atom acting as the main CPU, there are at least a half a dozen or more embedded MCUs.

And one of the fastest growth areas is anything to do with capacitive touch sensor-based gesture recognition, well illustrated by the hard-sell videos from companies such as Texas Instruments, Microchip, Freescale, Cypress and Atmel. But the opportunies this offers to developers comes at the cost of greater design and development complexity.

One measure of still increasing opportunities and challenges ahead are the number of research projects pushing gesture recognition to its limits.