Days numbered for mouse

  • 2012-08-22
  • From wire reports

VILNIUS - Lithuania-based Neurotechnology, a company focused on high-precision biometric identification, artificial intelligence, object recognition technology and software development products announced Monday the availability of its NPointer application, which utilizes simple hand movements to control the computer, without having to use a mouse, reports LatinosPost. The program, available on the company’s Web site as a free download, requires just a webcam and the NPointer software to function on Microsoft Windows-based machines.

“Today’s release of NPointer is the first step toward gesture recognition that does not require special hardware,” Vaidas Didvalis, NPointer project leader said in a statement. “We expect this technology will find many new fields of application and, based on user feedback, we will continue to improve it.”

To utilize the program, all the computer user has to do is place their hand on their desk and computer vision technology allows hand movements to be recorded via a webcam and then translated into pointer movements that are displayed on screen. NPointer emulates actions one would normally perform with a mouse including clicks, double-clicks, drags, scrolls and the like.

“Similar to a touchpad on a computer, NPointer uses the image of your hand as if it were a mouse,” Jennifer Newton, a representative for Neurotechnology, told Latinospost.com. “You hold your hand still and then controls will be brought up on screen, and then you tap your finger to use it as a pointer over any spot on the computer screen.”
Additionally, the program is designed to cater to the disabled population, as it can also function using movements from a person’s head or arm.

“It detects whatever is moving and uses what’s moving as a pointer,” Newton said.
Neurotechnology was founded in 1990 in Lithuania as a product of many years of advanced research in neuro-informatics, image processing and pattern recognition. Since that time, the company has released upwards of eighty products that provide biometric fingerprint, face, iris, palm-print and voice identification algorithms, as well as object recognition technologies and software development products.