Gestigon Ports its Firmware to PMD and Inuitive Hardware

gestigon and pmdtechnologies announce a collaboration that combines Samsung’s GearVR, pmd’s CamBoard pico flexx depth sensor and gestigon’s Carnival AR/VR Interaction Suite to showcase how existing VR devices can be augmented with touchless interaction.

"pmd is proud to contribute our advanced depth sensing technology to gestigon’s effort,“ states Bernd Buxbaum, CEO of pmdtechnologies. “We are excited to bring a new VR user experience to Samsung’s GearVR headset,” confirms Moritz von Grotthuss, CEO of gestigon.

Current ways to interact with Gear VR applications are extremely limited, involving turns and nods of the head to indicate menu choices. gestigon’s Carnival SDK enables a more natural interaction by visualizing the user’s hands within the application and using gesture recognition to choose from multiple choice menus or interact with virtual objects. The Carnival SDK requires depth information generated by pmd’s pico flexx sensor, which is mounted in the front of the Gear VR headset and connected to the smartphone’s USB port:

Inuitive, a developer of 3D computer vision and image processors, and gestigon announce a collaboration to bring gesture recognition to embedded virtual reality platforms.

“Using today’s head-mounted VR displays, my hands are either not visible, or the tracking is so slow and inaccurate that the hands feel more like a robot’s and not my own,” says Moritz v. Grotthuss, CEO of gestigon.

Second generation head-mounted-devices will include front-facing 3D sensors to improve realism, but component cost and power consumption are key concerns. Bringing together the Inuitive NU3000 multi-core imaging processor and gestigon gesture recognition algorithms, the collaboration between the two companies aims to address these concerns.

“Our unique technology and architecture uses input from standard, low-cost cameras to efficiently generate depth maps. Now, through our collaboration with gestigon, we can offer a complete one-stop solution to our customers, shortening the development cycle,” said Shlomo Gadot, CEO and Co-Founder of Inuitive.

Inuitive’s NU3000 processor incorporates two CEVA MM3101 high-performance, low-power imaging and computer vision vector DSP cores. In addition, it integrates a dedicated hardware accelerator capable of extracting real-time depth maps from stereo vision input. The gestigon gesture recognition algorithms, based on its Carnival AR/VR Interaction Suite, are customized and optimized to run directly on this processor to provide fingertip and hand tracking, as well as gesture recognition.