Vision Based Hand Gesture Interfaces for Wearable Computing and ...

Chapter 2. Literature Review
very reliably in indoor settings. The authors note that the limited expressiveness
and outdoor performance might be remedied with a laser beam that produces
structured (grid-patterned) light instead of the constant illumination of the LEDs.
Computer vision can provide services to many different applications. Its flex-
ibility due to the absence of physical devices (aside from the camera of course)
and due to most of its implementation being software-based rather than in hard-
ware, reconfiguration and in particular adaptation to the individual are a matter
of software adjustments, as opposed to cumbersome or impossible device changes.
The interested reader is referred to a fairly recent survey by Porta [135]. Also,
Turk [177] recently evaluated the state of computer vision as interface modality
and gives advice as to which challenges must be overcome before widespread vision
interfaces can become possible.
2.5 Virtual environments and applications
This section discusses some general issues of Virtual Environments (VEs) and
Geographic Information Systems and then continues the previous section by look-
ing at ways to perform vision-based human-computer interaction with VEs.
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