Interactive Displays: Natural Human-Interface Technologies

Chapter 1Senses, Perception, and Natural Human-Interfaces for Interactive Displays

Achintya K. Bhowmik

Intel Corporation, USA

1.1 Introduction

Visual displays are now an integral part of a wide variety of electronic devices as the primary human interface to the computing, communications and entertainment systems which have become ubiquitous elements of our daily lives at home, work, or on the go. Whether it be the watches on our wrists, or the mobile phones that we are carrying everywhere with us in our pockets or purses, or the tablets that we are using for surfing the web and consuming multimedia content, or the laptop and desktop computers on which we are getting our work done, or the large-screen television sets at the center of our living rooms, or the presentation projectors in the business meetings, the visual display is the “face” of all these devices to us, the users.

The same applies to a plethora of vertical applications, such as the check-in kiosks at airports, check-out kiosks at retail stores, signages at shopping malls, public displays at museums – the list goes on and on. The wide array of applications and insatiable market demands have fuelled worldwide research and development to advance visual display technologies and products of all form factors in the past decades, ranging from mobile displays to large screens [1–5].

A quick glance at the market size helps us grasp just how pervasive visual displays have become in our lives. In the last five years, according ...