Imaging steering your car in a 3D racing game by tilting your MID to left or right. No need to press button or tap the touch screen. Suddenly your MID has become an intelligent device which recognises movements/motions/gestures and use that to steer your car in the game!!! And all your MID needs is a camera. No expensive hardware add-ons!!!


Camera Based Input (CBI) will work use image processing to recognise user movements and convert them as inputs to your game.


When the game starts, the user will be asked to callibrate the screen and camera movement.The CBI will initialize in the background and start receiving the video stream from the camera. This will not be displayed to the user. The user will still see the game screen.


The CBI will try to recognise some "reference points" in the video initially and store them.
There will be on screen instruction to tilt the MID to left. Once the user does that, the CBI will try to locate those "reference points" in the changed video and calculate the shift/delta.Similarly for right, up and down movements, the CBI will store all the information.


When the game starts, the CBI will query the camera every N unit of time and do image processing to get idea of what gesture was performed. These will be converted as inputs to the game.


This may, however, not work as well as defined in the theory above. The player will have to keep the MID quite steady for this to work. Also, this type of movement may not work when the user is travelling (lots of external movements). But this sure is an interesting piece of thing I would like to have on my MID!!!


Here is a screenshot on how the gestures will work: