Personal Hackdays building a cell phone

For my third hackday in 2020 I wanted to dabble with user input control something like is seen in the movie "Minority Report".   I had a few ideas how that might be accomplished and technology has come a ways since the movie first came out.   For one, using led equipped gloves like the characters do in the movie would almost be cheating today but that did give me the idea that you could use something like the Wii controllers use.

For those unfamiliar with the Wii, there is a little bar that you set under or above your television and you point the wii remote at the tv and you can move a pointer around on the screen.   What's going on is the bar at the television contains a couple of Infrared LED's and the wiimote actually has an IR camera in it.   This let's the remote see the LED points which are a known distance apart and you can use that to figure out where your hand is pointing the remote.   

Anyhoo... there are other possibilities too these days.  There is the handtrack.js library that one could try to leverage which actually does ML right in your browser in javascript and you could attempt to track hands just using the built in webcam.

I used this project as an excuse to finally get a Leap motion controller though and that's the route I followed here.   It's a pretty capable controller and has handy libs already built.

Hackday #3 - Gesture control ala "Minority Report"

https://allthethin.gs/pages/hackdays/2020-hackday3-gesture-control/page1.html

-Ivan