CamBoard Pico brings gesture control to the PC in a small package

You can already hook a Kinect up to a PC, and the Leap Motion will be available from Best Buy starting on May 19. There’s also the MYO, an armband that attempts to give you gesture controls on your PC. Gesture control is the new thing, whether we like Minority Report or not. Now, enter the CamBoard Pico, a device that boasts more precise gesture control than the Leap Motion, and in a smaller package.

Created by pmdtechnologies, the Pico is a 3D depth sensor stuffed into a small sensor bar. Compared to the Leap Motion, which simply measures the distance of fingertips to provide gesture control, the CamBoard Pico uses “time-of-flight” data to create a point cloud. You can move your hand (or air stylus!) around in the point cloud, and the CamBoard is able to recognize the gestures and respond accordingly.

The demonstration in the video shows the CamBoard Pico returning some accurate results, from a hand performing swiping functions to navigate between webpages and scroll through text, to using a finger to play Fruit Ninja without making mistakes. The video also shows a user writing in the air, and the Pico capturing the text and displaying it on screen. Granted, the “writing” is more akin to “incoherent scribbling,” but the Pico captures the scribbles precisely, and without too much lag.

Pmdtechnologies sells its tech to other manufacturers to include in their own products, so it’s possible that we’ll see a CamBoard Pico included in a computer sometime in the future — that is, if gesture control takes off like all of these companies think it will.