Video: Texas Instruments Demos Motion Control Phones

Texas Instruments might be best known for its Pico projection technology and scientific calculators, but at its booth here at Mobile World Congress, the thing drawing the biggest crowds was a futuristic concept phone. One of the trippier features of its OMAP 4 developer platform, announced last year but demoed for the first time this week, is touchless gesturing, the ability to manipulate objects onscreen without actually touching it.

 This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of motion control– Toshiba even shipped a laptop with it– but this is the first time we’ve seen the technology implemented on a phone.

The technology requires a camera to capture your movements. So, although Texas Instruments’ proof-of-concept device had a webcam attached, it seems we’ll need phones that have forward-facing cameras. When I carefully aligned my hand in front of the camera, pointing my finger upward and making sure that both my hand and finger were perpindicular to the ground, a matching pink graphic of a pointing finger appeared on screen.

Then, I flicked my finger to the left or to the right and watched the menus onscreen shift instantly. I learned after a few tries that I could move the menus even with a subtle  wag of my finger. Ultimately, the most difficult part wasn’t the gesturing, but making sure my finger was aligned just right. And, after I flicked my finger to move the menus, I had to realign my finger before I could do it again.

Ultimately, I can see myself using this to scroll through photos, Web pages, and musical selections. Texas Instruments just needs to work out the kinks first. And cell phone makers need to take advantage of this feature in their phones.