VentureBeat

Inspired by the Nintendo Wii’s clever wand-like game controller, gesture-recognition start-ups are coming out of the woodwork. Israel’s 3DV Systems is one of the contenders and it is showing more of its cards.

The Yokne’am, Israel company said it plans to launch a low-cost gesture-recognition camera for game purposes in 2009. And it has hired a well-known video game veteran as its general manager for the North American market. Charles Bellfield, the new hire, has worked at a variety of video game companies in the past 15 years.

3DV is one of a number of companies that want to make it much easier to control games. It has refined a sophisticated camera, the ZCam, that can detect the gestures a person is making and translates those gestures into controls for a video game. You can thus stand in front of a game machine with the camera, wave your arms about, and control everything in the game.

The idea riffs off the motion sensor in the Nintendo Wii but takes it to a much more precise control through simple gestures. You could, for instance, turn up the volume in a game by making a thumbs-up sign. Or you could drive in a racing game by holding out your hands as if you were gripping a steering wheel. I demoed an early version where I was able to fly a plane in a game by putting my hand up in the air and using it as an imaginary joystick.

The 11-year-old 3DV has been making the cameras for years and still sells a $250,000 version for broadcasters who use it insert images into TV shows in real time. The company refined the technology and took out the costs so that it can apply it to the consumer market. By the end of this year, the company will be mass producing the consumer ZCam cameras and it will launch with games in 2009, Bellfield said in an interview.

I knew Bellfield as the die-hard spokesman for Sega, as that company’s Dreamcast video game console business was sinking. Bellfield didn’t tolerate anyone feeling sorry for poor old Sega. More recently, Bellfield did stints as a marketing executive for game companies Capcom and Codemasters. Think of him as the P.T. Barnum of video games. He will be joined by 3DV’s vice president of interactive entertainment, Rich Flier.

Bellfield said 3DV can come in as a differentiator for video game companies. Innovative ideas such as musical-instrument games “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” allow their makers to charge $99 and $169 respectively for their unique games. He said that at a time when low-end Flash games are becoming a commodity and high-end games are becoming increasingly expensive to make, developers should turn to novel approaches to gaming to set themselves apart.

Bellfield said the device will run across a variety of platforms and plugs into a universal serial bus (USB) port on any computer or game device. It will be about the same size as a webcam. Bellfield said the company is talking to a variety of developers and publishers. Those game makers are thinking of either enhancing existing games, such as making shooting games better, or creating new categories of games.

Traditionally, gaming peripherals don’t sell that well. But the Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Wii itself have turned that notion upside down.

“It’s hard to launch something new, but what we have here is a more disruptive technology,” Bellfield said. “You touch nothing, but you can control everything.”

Demonstrations like those by 3DV have spurred the imagination, but they have also drawn out the competition. Another Israeli competitor claiming to have the best 3-D gesture control system is Prime Sense in Tel Aviv. Other rivals include Softkinetic, XTR, Oblong Industries, Canesta, ThinkOptics and GestureTek. We’ve written about 3DV and these others here and here.

Clearly, not all of these companies are going to survive and they’re going to have live through a long gestation before their products see the light of day. The ultimate blessing would be if a game console maker adopts the newfangled controllers, but the next console systems aren’t going to be out until 2010. Meanwhile, there is a rumor that Microsoft will join the motion-sensor control party with a new controller next week at the E3 show.

update
In ten years, the gaming instruments we use today will look ridiculously old-fashioned.

The Nintendo Wii is big because it lets you move things on your screen with gestures of your hand, using a motion-sensitive paddle. But that’s nothing compared with what’s coming: controlling the screen with nothing in your hand at all. One day, very soon, you’ll be able to control an avatar or character on a screen with a mere gesture of your hands or body.

A range of companies are working on this dream, but few seem to be succeeding. They’re often hyped and fail to live up to their promise. We wrote about Softkinetic a year ago (it has a very cool demo), but the company hasn’t released any news since last year, and its CEO has since moved on. At that time, Softkinetic demonstrated the product to us, but in a very controlled lighting environment, and they wouldn’t let us personally try it out. From what we saw, though, we were impressed.

Softkinetic’s product required infrared cameras, mounted on your screen, to track your gestures. The infrared tracked the depth of your movement (distance from screen), by calculating how much time it took for the signal pulses to bounce off the body part and return to the camera. Also, it turns out, there are only so many ways a body, head and shoulders can rotate (joints constrain your movements), and so Softkinetic’s algorithmic software and visual sensors provided all the data necessary to supplement the depth input. We’re not sure why Softkinetic has apparently languished and not hit the market yet.

Another company Xtr3D, tracks your movements from a camera, but without infrared. The technology, while apparently less expensive, doesn’t seem fast enough to respond to gestures, at least when we saw it, and so isn’t ready for prime-time either.

Next, there’s the quiet Oblong Industries, a secretive Los Angeles-based “gesture recognition” startup that has just raised around $8.8 million in a first round of funding led by Foundry Group. Brad Feld and Ryan McIntyre of Foundry have taken board seats on the company, but we don’t know whether this is a gesture technology for games or something more focused, like an iPhone or some other PDA device [Update: AlarmClock has some basic information on the company]

Next, there’s ZCam, a product from 3DV, an Israeli company that offers a technology similar to Softkinetic’s. But the company says it won’t hit the market for the first time until the second half of next year. Like Softkinetic, 3DV is showing off demos that impress, but which are still controlled by the company. Dean Takahashi writes up a review of the product here.

3DV says it will ship its camera and a game that works with it for less than $100, and will put you in the game so you can fly an airplane with your hand gestures, and then use finger gestures to go higher, bank, or begin shooting (lift your thumb and press down on an imaginary joystick). Very much like Softkinetic, the camera measures the distance of the object (your hand and body) from the camera on a real-time basis, calculating it for each pixel in the frame. It uses infrared and image sensors too, which depend on regular light. That lighting is what has limited the effectiveness of the technology so far, because varied lighting can create distortion.

Unlike Softkinetic, 3DV apparently has some high-profile venture capital backing. It is 62 percent owned by Israeli company Elron — at least it was a year ago. That’s when the company announced it had signed an agreement with Silicon Valley venture firm Kleiner Perkins and Pitango for a $15 million investment. But at the time, Elron said the investment was contingent on certain conditions being met. The firms are noted as investors on the company’s web site, so we assume the investment was made (Update: Kleiner Perkins has since confirmed an investment, but not an amount).

Finally, there’s GestureTek, of Sunnyvale, which received a strategic investment Spanish telecom giant Telefonica, and earlier funding from NTT DoCoMo, which we reported just a couple of days ago. See demo video below. There’s also a demo of its mobile application here.