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Show HN: YoHa – A practical hand tracking engine

handtracking.io

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Re: Show HN: YoHa – A practical hand tracking engine

#61

Post by b-3-n »

layer8 wrote: post #42

What would be nice is a version that can be used to paint on the screen with your fingers, such that the lines are visible on a remotely shared screen. The use-case is marking up/highlighting on a normal desktop monitor (i.e. non-touch) while screen-sharing, which is awkward using a mouse or touchpad (think circling stuff in source code and documents, drawing arrows etc.). That would mean (a) a camera from behind (fa…

Thank you for sharing this creative idea. "so that the fingers can touch (or almost touch) the screen" I think this is a big advantage of this approach since you can only achieve this with the back facing camera. On the flip side, with a back facing camera you either have to place the camera in between yourself and the screen which might be awkward or you have to ensure a placement of the camera behind you that isn't prone to occlusions (e.g. your head or chair might occlude your hands from the cameras point of view). The latter might also make calibration more difficult or impact precision since you might have to mount the camera with some elevation causing a less optimal camera angle.

Re: Show HN: YoHa – A practical hand tracking engine

#62

Post by b-3-n »

rafamct wrote: post #43
b-3-n wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this inspiring question. For interpreting sign language you need multi-hand support which YoHa is currently lacking. Apart from that you likely also need to account for the temporal dimension which YoHa also does not do right now. If those things were implemented I'm confident that it would produce meaningful results.

It's worth noting that movements of the mouth are extremely important in ASL (and other sign languages) and so this probably isn't as useful as it might seem at first.

Thank you for pointing this out. I overlooked this. I presume that on top of that what also could be relevant is the movements of arms, facial expressions and maybe also general body posture. Please correct me if I'm wrong as I'm not too familiar with sign language.

Re: Show HN: YoHa – A practical hand tracking engine

#63

Post by borplk »

b-3-n wrote: post #29
borplk wrote: post #26

Very impressive. I want something like this so I can bind hand gestures to commands. For example scroll down on a page by a hand gesture.

One can build this pretty easily for a website that you are hosting with the existing API ( https://github.com/handtracking-io/yoha/tree/master/docs ). However, you likely want this functionality on any website that you are visiting for which you probably need to build a browser extension. I haven't tried incorporating YoHa into a browser extension but if somebody were to try I'd be happy to help.

That's nice but I'd also want it for general desktop stuff.

So I guess it would have to be sitting on my machine.

For example hand gestures to switch the desktop workspace.

Swipe left/right motion to switch desktop workspace. That would be the dream :)

Re: Show HN: YoHa – A practical hand tracking engine

#64

Post by pasabagi »

itake wrote: post #11

I think these tools are super interesting, but I tools like this marginalize users with non-standard number of limbs or fingers.

I feel the opposite. The more computer interfacing takes place in software, the better for disabled users. If you have a device that expects a keyboard scancode to respond, then you need to build a physical keyboard to talk to it. Building a physical keyboard that doesn't suck is expensive, and so disabled people pay crazy prices for gear tailored to them.

Tailoring software that can use very general-purpose input equipment is much cheaper. Training a neural net to recognize one-handed gestures, for instance, could be done by one developer then deployed worldwide. Making a decent one-hand keyboard is way less easy and way harder to scale.

Re: Show HN: YoHa – A practical hand tracking engine

#65

Post by bjackman »

rafamct wrote: post #43
b-3-n wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for this inspiring question. For interpreting sign language you need multi-hand support which YoHa is currently lacking. Apart from that you likely also need to account for the temporal dimension which YoHa also does not do right now. If those things were implemented I'm confident that it would produce meaningful results.

It's worth noting that movements of the mouth are extremely important in ASL (and other sign languages) and so this probably isn't as useful as it might seem at first.

Signs also tend to be expressed by the hands' position/movement in relation to _other_ body parts.

Edit: OTOH fingerspelling (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fingerspelling) might be a more feasible usecase!

Re: Show HN: YoHa – A practical hand tracking engine

#66

Post by voakbasda »

itake wrote: post #35
colordrops wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you suggest be done about it?

I'm fine with using them, as long as alternatives are available for people with disabilities are able to participate as well. Imagine if your bank started using these to access your account and suddenly disabled customers could no longer use their adaptive input devices to interact with their account.

So we can't give people nice things unless we can give everyone nice things?

Re: Show HN: YoHa – A practical hand tracking engine

#67

Post by stavros »

This looks great! Recently I've been wanting to make a hand-tracking library for video editing. I'd make a hand gesture like an OK with my index and thumb to begin recording, and when I was done I'd make a thumbs up to keep the take or thumbs down to delete a bad take. That way, I could very easily record stuff while only keeping the good takes, to sort out later.

Hell, the library could even stitch the takes together, omitting the times when my hand started/finished doing the gestures.

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