Hover ..................................
Add a touch of Minority Report to your PC with this inexpensive gesture-control board.
Tom Cruise first made it cool in MinorityReport and Robert Downey Jr is still trying to top it: it seems cinema thinks there's nothing we want to do more than communicate with our computers by gesticulating manically in their general direction.
While these tantalising visions of human-computer interaction are still some way off, you can get a taste of it for just £32 (including VAT) with Hover, a tiny 6cm square development board that's compatible with a wide range of single-board computers and micro controllers, such as the Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
The premise is simple: swipe your hand up, down, left or right a few inches above the board (the website states from up to 5 inches away, but 3.5 inches was our usable limit) and the board registers your interaction. We're not talking slow and deliberate swiping motions here – a flick of the wrist in the general direction will do the job.
If you like to prod at your tech too, the board will also register touch events. It has five touch-sensitive areas: the centre and the surrounding north, east, south and west edges.
While you'll need to program the if or while statements yourself (developer Hover Labs promises updates to the library to support this more easily), the board is fully capable of registering double taps and multi-touch events. In short, an elaborate combination of hand gestures and touch events is just a sprinkling of code away.
The makers certainly deserve plaudits for making the board compatible with such a wide range of platforms. While most development boards of this ilk might just support Arduino with a rudimentary Python library thrown in for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, Hover has full installation instructions and code examples for not one but four platforms, including the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, pcDuino and the lesser known Spark Core.
Installation is a simple process too. Besides its I2C connectivity, there are just two GPIO pins to connect and the board is compatible with either 5V or 3.3V microcontrollers with the help of onboard logic level shifting. As a rare and welcome bonus, the board's breadboard-compatible header comes pre-soldered too.
Easy configuration
We tested Hover with the Raspberry Pi and found it very straightforward to configure. Assuming you're already geared up for I2C communication, it's just a case of setting up the breadboard and downloading the provided Python library. While it's relatively basic, the library is one of the best documented we've seen for some time and it's clearly designed to help hackers and makers of all levels get the most from the hardware.
The example script for the Hover ensures you can quickly drag and drop Hover-compatible code into your project, though it would be nice for the team to update the library to support multi-touch out of the box – as it was, at least at the time of writing, the library hadn't been updated for four months.
That said, there are lots of great project examples and ideas to be found on the official Hover Labs website ( www.hoverlabs.co/projects), including a section devoted to controlling retro games. But while we liked the idea of directing Frogger into oncoming traffic with a mere flick of the wrist, we were particularly taken with the video that shows a basic implementation of GoogleEarth control, which uses a combination of touch and gestures.
Adding Hover to just about any computer or application is pretty easy too. Using an Arduino Leonardo or similar you can plug in a Hover as a pseudo-HID, tricking pretty much any computer into thinking it's just another keyboard or mouse. Clever stuff.