Feet can be used as a TrackingAction controller

[MartyG]

Hi everyone,

Inspired by stories I remembered about how Apple thumb recognition pads could be fooled by all sorts of vaguely thumb-shaped objects such as cat paws, I decided to take my sock off and hold my foot up to the camera to see if it would treat the foot and toes like a palm center and fingers.  And it did!  I was able to activate gesture recognition by pushing the sole of my foot towards the camera and then bend and un-bend virtual fingers by wiggling my toes.  :) 

[MartyG]

BTW I kept my hands behind my back whilst doing this to make sure it wasn't picking up my fingers.  It definitely was foot recognition!

I imagine this has applications for developing programs for physically disabled people who do not have the use of arms / hands, among other things.

EDIT: I just tested it with the knee joint sucessfully too.  I rolled my trouser leg up and pushed the knee at the camera to activate control and moved the knee around to move virtual fingers.  Obviously it's a lot less precise than toe control, but overall, knee and toe recognition means that full control of a virtual leg with the real leg is feasible (though in practice, ideally you want two cameras dedicated to the hands and legs unless you treat the RL right hand as the hand controller and assign the leg / feet to the left-hand joint detection.)

[Martin_W__K_]

LOL - thats great :-)

Btw. good to know.

[simsam7]

That's pretty cool, well done for actually trying that out Marty!

I love it when people use stuff in innovative ways for something slightly other than what it was originally intended for :-) 

Makes you think of other possibilities.

[MartyG]

I had another look at RealSense's ability to track the toes of the feet, because it sees them as the same shape as fingers and with the same kinds of joint shapes and positions.

Having a quick browse through the code of the scripts that drive hand tracking, it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult for Intel's RealSense engineers to add foot-joint definitions to the tracking scripts for the 2015 SDK.  After all, it could essentially be a copy of the hand-tracking code but with foot-joint labels like 'Big_Toe_Base' and 'Small_Toe_JT1' instead of 'Index_Base' and 'Pinky_JT1.'

This would draw attention to next year's RealSense pioneer creators that RealSense could do more than just track hands but could provide leg control too (since the camera also recognizes the knee joint and treats it like a giant palm-center for basic swinging around of an object.)