With Kinect we saw a who new way for us to interact with our computers and environment, which brought along with it a whole new enthusiasm for motion controlled computing.

Well if Microsoft Research UK has their way we could be seeing yet another major shift in how we control our devices and with nothing more than off-the-shelf components.

Called DIGITS it is a way to track the motion of a person’s hand and then model it in a three-dimensional space with a series of wrist mounted infrared sensors. Granted the prototype, as seen in the video, is on the bulky side and would probably garner you some weird looks from people on the street but given our ability to miniaturize just about anything these days there is no doubt that this prototype will definitely shrink in size in very short order.

As David Kim, a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellow from Newcastle University’s Culture Lab, said in an article on the Microsoft Research blog they can see the day when this could be reduced down to the size of a wrist watch.

“These components enable us to quickly test and verify different ideas, configurations, and form factors without having to worry about the engineering side,” Kim says. “We need this kind of flexibility to fail and improve early and to quickly iterate the design. Ultimately, we would like to reduce Digits to the size of a watch that can be worn all the time. We want users to be able to interact spontaneously with their electronic devices using simple gestures and not even have to reach for their devices.”

Who says Microsoft doesn’t innovate.

via GeekWire