Catching up with GestureTek Camera Control Tech

High hopes for motion-sensing mobile games in Europe

http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/Mobile/GestureTek/news.asp?c=5707
By Stuart Dredge

Feb 12 2008 - GestureTek has already made a name for itself with innovative camera-control technology in games like 3D Tilt-a-World.

The company is part of a trend of firms looking to technology as a solution to the control problems of mobile gaming (Zeemote is another example). GestureTek's technology involves taking data from your camera and relating it to movement onscreen.

We caught up with CTO Francis MacDougall, just before he headed off to make the company's pitch for the GSMA Innovation award.

The key thing we wanted to ask him was when we might see some European games using GestureTek's EyeMobile platform. The omens are good, given that O2's parent company Telefonica invested in GestureTek last November.

MacDougall told us an interesting nugget about Japan, where the company's technology has been in several of NTT DoCoMo's handsets, and is being used for the operator's range of Chokkan motion-sensing games.

However, a rival firm's accelerometer-based tech was in another DoCoMo phone. MacDougall says that's not the case any more, and that DoCoMo preferred GestureTek's camera-based tech so much, it decided to go with it.

GestureTek is also working on using a phone's camera to provide 'finger gestures', enabling you to wiggle your fingers around to make things happen. It could throw up some interesting new game ideas.