Montreal: DSI Datotech Systems of Montreal hasn’t set out to reinvent the mouse, just replace it – specifically in the area of 3D applications. The new tool is a multiple-point hand-based gesture interface called the HandGear touchpad.

HandGear is designed to recognize intuitive or natural hand and finger motion, pressure, position and speed in a manner that allows animators and designers to ‘grab’ and modify 3D objects in realtime. The interface system provides users with a three-axis navigation tool, and the ability to edit, model and transform in 3D environments.

Tim Heaney, DSI’s VP marketing, says care has been taken not to disrupt the traditional user environment. ‘We say to the user, ‘Keep using your mouse for selections, or keep using your tablette for the way you want to do painting, but put other controls in your non-dominant hand.’ And we come in with a non-dominant hand control to enrich the user’s feature set and interactivity.’

Datotech says that working with the technology offers a greater degree of freedom for organic and technical modelers.

‘The animator can manipulate and transform objects and navigate in either perspective or camera view,’ says Michel Leroux, DSI director of product marketing. ‘[Our] technology provides realtime 3D direct interaction with the Discreet 3ds max interface. Simply being able to slide your fingers over a pad and bypass repetitive mouse-keyboard commands will improve productivity.’

HandGear is DSI’s first product and is immediately available with an application program interface (API) plug-in for 3ds max. The Softimage|XSI plug-in will be commercially available for SIGGRAPH 2002 in late July, while commercial delivery of an API plug-in for Alias|Wavefront’s Maya is expected in August.

Gesture recognition technology

HandGear’s underlying software contains a Gesture Recognition Library, an enabling code that allows the program to sense finger movements on the touchpad and intelligently map gesture movement onto specific applications.

‘If you move your fingers in a sort of circular motion, that equates in one application to a rotation. If you take three fingers and rotate them in another direction, that means ‘translate an object.’ Take your fingers and spread them apart and you are now scaling an object,’ explains Heaney. ‘There are points within the object that you can match to the fingers, and as they are moved on the active surface area, you are controlling the object in a very nonlinear way.’

In character modeling or ‘puppeteering,’ simultaneous finger motions will make the character’s arms move simultaneously. In this demonstration, ‘the thumb would be assigned to one arm and the index finger to the other. The arms [or hands] are brought together following the path of the joining fingers, or you can actually assign certain points of the arm to the various fingers and have complete control of the arm and create animation,’ Heaney says.

HandGear also has ‘fore-sensing’ capabilities, the capacity to exercise control through pressure, representing a new dimensional component for control and object manipulation.

Luc Larouche, president of Side City Studios in Montreal, is among those who have tested HandGear.

‘The touchpad we tried was fantastic,’ he says. ‘We believe it will be a revolutionary tool, and we can’t wait to integrate it into our production environment.’

Another prerelease tester, Robert Rioux, a Maya artist at Montreal’s Meteor Studios, says, ‘The DSI touchpad provides much greater possibilities than a three-button mouse. The pressure sensitivity in particular is a great feature that a mouse can’t offer.’

DSI started developing its proprietary hardware and software in Vancouver some six years ago. While development work continues in Vancouver, the company has grown up mostly in the past year at its headquarters in Dorval, QC.

-www.dato.com