DESCRIBING objects is so much easier when you use your hands, the classic being "the fish was this big". For humans, it's easy to understand what is meant but computers struggle, and existing gesture-based interfaces only use set movements that translate into particular instructions. Now a system called Data Miming can recognise objects from gestures without the user having to memorise a "vocabulary" of specific movements. "Starting from the observation that humans can effortlessly understand which objects are being described when hand motions are used, we asked why computers can't do the same thing," says Christian Holz of the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany.
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