Sporshohin: A Tale of Devising Visible Light Based Low-Cost Robust Touchless Input Device

Abstract

In recent times, migrating from touch-based input devices to touchless input devices has become one of the major research problems considering the health hazards exposed in public usages (e.g., information kiosk) of the touch-based devices. The problem still remains mostly open, since a solution having the properties of being low-cost, low power consuming, robust, and easy-to-use, is yet to be proposed in the literature. As a remedy to this situation, in this paper, we propose a visible light based touchless input device (named Sporshohin), retaining all the properties mentioned above, for ensuring ubiquitous usage. Sporshohin recognizes predefined gestures performed by the user, through an underlying mechanism that exploits well-known reflection model over the visible light spectrum. The underlying mechanism is intelligent enough to guarantee robustness against varying environmental lighting conditions and undefined noisy gestures. Real implementation, involving interaction with diversified users, confirms high accuracy and usability along with existence of all the above mentioned properties. We show the emulation of Sporshohin as an input interface for an information kiosk. The attributes of Sporshohin exhibit its prospect of being used in diversified applications going beyond information kiosks.