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Computers "Will Soon Jump to Our Every Word"
It"s late evening in Munich station and you need a bed for the night. The tourist bureau is closed and there"s no phone in sight. So what"s new? Well, there"s still the latest information system to try out.
Projected as an image on a wall in the station is a street map of the city and a set of icons. You point to the hotel icon and then circle with your finger the district you want. A more detailed street map, with flashing spots representing the hotels.
You point to one of the spots, and a list gives price and availability of rooms. You book by pointing to the telephone icon. A message on the wall tells you that a car is on its way to pick you up.
The fantasy could be a reality within a year or two, says Christopher Maggioni, the leader of a German electronics company. His research team at the company"s laboratory in Munich has already built working prototypes (供试验用的样品). They remove the need to master trick procedures on the keyboard, and leave little hardware on show for vandals to wreck. "These are the two great advantages," Mr. Maggioni says.
"The systems are also fine for sterile environments and for clearing the office desktop." He sees doctors using gesture recognition systems in hospital operation theatres where unsterilised equipment is banned.
In the office, the clutter of telephones, diaries and address books on a desk could be a thing of the past. When you wanted to make a call, the image of a keypad could be projected on to the pile of papers beside you and you would move your fingers over the numbers as you do with a real telephone. Speakers and a microphone would be buried in the furnishings. For around $5,500 the system is also fairly cheap. It consists of a standard video camera and projector, and a computer.
For decades, researchers in the US, Japan and Europe have been looking at ways of getting rid of the keyboard and of using gestures, voice and even eye movements to simplify the manner in which humans communicate with computers.
A number of companies claim to have built working prototypes of a computer system that recognises head movements. This could be an important advance in the development of 3D television. Researchers now say that they can generate two images from a single screen and use a video camera to track the head to ensure that each image goes to the correct eye.
For Mr. Maggioni, the next big advance will be computers controlled by a combination of gestures and speech. Over the next few months, the company is due to launch a computer for the medical profession that will let doctors input data by talking to the machine, he says.