Steven Truong

Overview

This web site documents my involvement in the development of the Systems Level Integration Practical. The team worked on technology in the speckled computing department, where "specks are programmable semiconductor devices which can sense, compute and network wirelessly." Specks are minute (around 1mm^3) and are autonomous with its own captive, renewable energy source. In the future thousands of specks can be scattered or sprayed on people or objects and will produce programmable computational networks known as Specknets.

In our initial meetings we discussed potential ideas for the project. The team were most interested in working with the Orient2 devices because they felt it was an exciting new technology. Our initial ideas originated from tracking body movements such as a martial art correction program i.e. perfecting fencing stances. Inspired by the movie Minority Report, we decided to go with the idea of building a gesture recognition system. Our idea was to show the future of speckled computing and to be able to control any pointer device when walking into a room, which is ideal for presentations. To give an example of how small specks are, a small specknet 8-bit device (5CubeOTS) measuring 5mm cube, which has a sensor, processor, wireless networking and battery is shown below.

The final system was named GeReMI (Gesture Recognition Mouse-free Interface), for the duration of the project I was placed in charge of building the system to recognise gestures performed using the pointers and/or the motion. An overall evaluation can be found here. I also made a presentation on future technologies and selected the Orient2 devices, which can be found here.