In 1983, a pair of Toronto inventors had an idea that would revolutionize the way we interact with computers. It only took the rest of the world 25 years to catch on.
To a large extent, waiting is a big part of the GestureTek story. But in a sense, the lag between the early days of their invention and wide-scale hardware innovation and adoption has been part of their success. Vincent says it has allowed them to keep their expectations reasonable. Early on, he and MacDougall decided that they’d license the technology to other companies and work with them to figure out how to commercialize it. This allowed them to avoid taking on the huge amounts of debt that would have accompanied product development and manufacturing. In fact, GestureTek was entirely self-financing right up until 2000, when the first 3-D depth cameras were invented. The opportunity these cameras presented meant that, for the first time, the founding pair felt seeking outside investors was worthwhile.
But Vincent and MacDougall were not just waiting for the technology to catch up and for prices to come down. They were also waiting for more near-sighted people see the possibilities they did. Vincent says that early on, before the internet, webcams and sophisticated graphics interfaces, he had a hard time explaining the product.
Even after the turn of the millennium, doubts persisted. For instance, in 2001, Vincent gave a presentation at the U.S. office of Nintendo. “I said, ‘This is going to be the future—people are going to want to get up off their couches, they’re going to want to move!’ And they said, ‘No way. No way. People don’t want to do anything except play with a game controller.’” It was, of course, Nintendo’s introduction of the Wii game system in 2006 that popularized gesture-based controls for videogames. Wii created its own interface that relied on a controller, but Vincent says that rather than being frustrated by the company’s rebuffing him only to later adopt something similar, GestureTek was happy to see the concept of full-body, movement-based controls become popular. Perhaps not coincidentally, Microsoft licensed GestureTek’s patents the same year the Wii hit stores.
Slowly, surely, over two and a half decades, technology has caught up. High-speed internet, the integration of webcams in computers and mobile devices, the invention of 3-D camera technology—all of these have created ever more fruitful conditions for GestureTek applications.
In addition to Microsoft, the company licensed its patent to Sony for the Playstation. And before that, in 2005, it licensed it to Hasbro for an educational game called iON that allowed children learn by interacting with popular characters on their television screen: A kid would appear onscreen with, say, Spongebob Squarepants and, in response to instructions from the character, point into the air to select musical notes or answers to math questions. Vincent says that children learn better using interactive technologies, and the company has sold 3-D floor, wall and table interfaces to schools across North America.
GestureTek has also found fertile ground in an entirely different sector as a rehabilitative tool used by physiotherapists. Patients who conduct exercises led by an interactive display built by GestureTek have been shown to work out longer and to enjoy the therapy more. Meanwhile, the computers also track progress and results for therapists, building a database of information about how the therapy program was carried out and how successful it was. All without any kind of wires or monitors. No such thing has been possible before.
Meanwhile, retail stores have been using the technology for point-of-purchase advertising. A display at the GestureTek office shows how people walking past a McDonald’s window might be lured into interacting with the company’s logo—moving letters with a flick of their finger—on what appears at first to be a simple poster. Four hundred Old Navy outlets across North America have installed box units that project an interactive advertising display onto the floor.
Vincent says that Microsoft’s Kinect, which capitalized in part on GestureTek’s technology, has helped boost the company’s prospects by introducing, for the first time, a cheap 3-D camera input for computers. That innovation will allow for the rapid advancement of GestureTek’s applications in any number of fields unrelated to gaming. In fact, the recent sale of the mobile and consumer arms of the company to Qualcomm is an evolution of GestureTek’s long-standing strategy. “It allows us to be much more focused and dedicated on the marketing, healthcare and educational areas of the business,” says Vincent.
Today, he envisions a future in which people have wall-sized screens in their houses that they control with gestures—screens that allow them to combine the uses of computers, televisions and gaming systems, and also control every technological aspect of their homes, turning appliances on and off and adjusting the temperature with a wave of their hand. He says gesture controls could be embedded in cars and appliances, among many other things. One senses, listening to him, that the Star Trek holodeck is becoming more science and less fiction every day.
