Trade shows of the scale of the Mobile World Congress always have constant serendipitous moments when you are standing in the 
canyon boulevards of four story exhibition booths frantically trying to orient yourself with thousands of people streaming by you. You forge on, look up and find yourself next to a booth and something about it catches your eye, or you run into someone you haven’t seen in a year, or even better you bump into someone you saw only two short weeks ago but 10,000 long miles away. Such are my run ins at the Mobile World Congress.
That’s how I came across GestureTek and Tagattitude.
Mobile Wii Device or Reflecting New Movement in Mobile Technology?
Gesture Tek provides computer “vision” and gesture-recognition technology for presentation, 
information and entertainment systems. Telefonica O2 recently announced a strategic investment in GestureTek and they were being showcased at the massive Telefonica Movistar booth.
What GestureTek does is provide motion sensor capabilities to your mobile phone-- without any additional costly chip or handset client. That’s critical since it means there is no additional cost layer to the operator nor consumer to make your phone a spectacular tool, especially for gaming. Think turning
your mobile handset into a Wii controller, and you’ve got the idea.
How they do this is even more remarkable. By engaging the camera on your phone a signal emanates from the lens and “senses” changes in the 3 dimensional topography the camera sees. Amazing. It must have some serious math processing going on somewhere in a box installed in the network.
GestureTek is a 20 year old company which has shaped ‘applied computer vision’ for computer-human interaction. The company’s multi-patented video gesture control technology (VGC) lets users control multi-media content, access information, manipulate special effects, even immerse themselves in an interactive 3D virtual world – simply by moving their hands or body. They deliver Wii-like gesture-control without the need to wear, hold or touch anything.
Seems the company has been way ahead of its time, and now the mobile camp has caught up with it and they’ll now become a permanent residence. No one from GestureTek was at the Telefonica booth on Wednesday while I fought throught the crowds there, so I’ll have to learn more about them at CTIA.
Bet on them getting attention in Vegas for CTIA.
Continue reading my "Slick Sightings" at MWC part two here.
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