HandVu

Technology has evolved considerably in the past ten years, with holographic projections now just something at our doorstep. What’s more, this technology is even available for testing on your personal computer, given the right devices, with HandVU being a suitable example in this regard, attempting to recognise hand gestures in front of a connected webcam.

In order for everything to run smooth, you need to make sure your webcam is connected, set up, and properly running. When the application is launched, input is captured immediately, with the main window displaying whatever’s in front of the connected camera.

However, the application is a bit more than just a method of testing out your webcam. In other words, HandVU is specially designed to recognise several hand gestures, which you can then use to trigger different other stuff, but it’s going to cost you some programming knowledge and skills.

Besides the window that shows camera feedback, there’s a command line box that displays a short description, as well as a set of controls for better recognition of hand gestures. Three levels of verbosity can be set, with results visible in real time. However, the lines, dots, and distortion that appears on screen are not effects, but rather the algorithm used to detect hand gestures.

Sadly, this is only the recognition counterpart, with the captured results only delivered to a specific server you need to manually connect to. As a standalone program, there’s not much use to pull, but if you want to implement hand gestures in other applications using this tool, then it’s what you’re looking for.

Taking everything into consideration, we come to the conclusion that HandVU is a neat tool you can integrate into more complex projects that can benefit from hand gestures. It’s not your average webcam recorder, with no controls in this regard, nor any option to get local results, so it’s best to test it out before putting it to good use.