Bird will let you control your smart home and more… with gestures

A big part of the user experience (that concept that pundits love to abbreviate as UX) in tech is how we interact with the systems around us. From mice, keyboards, and video game controllers to touchscreens and motion sensors, the ways we tell machines what to do are as many and as diverse as the devices themselves.

One startup from Israel hopes to unify our interaction with technology as we increasingly move toward connected living. MUV Interactive hopes that its product, called Bird, will help us control devices ranging from our TV to various thingamajigs that make our home smart.

Bird is a wearable controller that looks like a cross between a presentation clicker and a finger pulse oximeter. Working with a receiver that plugs in via USB, the system can read the Bird wearer’s hand position, direction, movement, and even posture. It can also receive voice commands. Additionally, using projection technology, it promises to turn any surface into an interactive display.

The company’s demo video shows users being able to pinch and zoom on pictures; swipe to flip through options, channels, or pages; grab virtual objects and moving them around a map; and draw on pages to annotate. And it all happens through gestures in the air. Even more so than products like Microsoft’s Kinect motion sensor, it’s a style very reminiscent to the interface used by Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s film, Minority Report, that brought the idea of gesture-based control systems to a mainstream audience.

Bird could be used to operate drones or control simulations of surgical procedures.

More impressively, MUV claims the functionality doesn’t stop at screen navigation. Wearing Bird, you can use gestures to turn the lights up or down, open or close the window shades, and turn the coffee machine on and off. Beyond the home, the startup says Bird could be used to operate drones or control simulations of surgical procedures. The system can tell multiple devices apart, so it can be used in a business or school environment for collaboration.

The whole thing seems like a more lifestyle-plus-corporate-friendly twist to motion control systems that were primarily meant for gaming, like the Kinect, Sony’s PlayStation Move, and Nintendo’s Wii Remote.