The U.K.’s Daily Mail had a piece on Friday about a pair of Australian scientists who have developed (and are seeking to commercialize) an optical gesture recognition system for TV control.  The researchers, from the University of Wollongong have developed a controller containing a digital video camera which can recognize 7 different gestures to control the TV (or other devices) using simple hand movements (like a “thumbs up” gesture to move up a channel).

Given the intricacies of most CE devices today, we don’t really see this scaling to completely replace a traditional remote control (or another pointing device like Hillcrest’s loop or one of its competitors), but the ability to interact with your TV without any device is appealing. At the very least it adds yet another wrinkle to the absolute vs. relative, optical vs. accelerometer motion sensing debates undeway within the industry.  And for very simple “on/off” or change channel/volume commands , we think this could be a very interesting complement to handheld-remote based systems.

You can read the article here.