The “Humantenna” project – joint work by UW CSE’s Gabe Cohn and Shwetak Patel and Microsoft Research’s Dan Morris and Desney Tan – is featured in today’s Computing Community Consortium blog. The CCC blog post builds on an article in New Scientist describing the research, presented at CHI 2012 earlier this month. There’s also a callout to the SoundWave project in the post – joint work by UW CSE’s Sidhant Gupta and Shwetak Patel and Microsoft Research’s Dan Morris and Desney Tan.
Humantenna uses the human body as an antenna to pick up the electromagnetic fields — generated by power lines and electrical appliances — that fill indoor and outdoor spaces. By measuring how the signal changes as users move through the electromagnetic fields, it’s possible to identify gestures, such as a punching motion or swipe of the hand.
Read the post here.