Project HovR

Contestants name : ODell Obrien

School name : Maktab Sabah

Abstract
In this digital era of 21 century, the advancement of computer input device technologies had
been greatly rising. From the evolution of optical mouse, to the introduction of touch screen as our daily
ways of providing input, this field of computer has been evolving maturely. Some are brave enough to
use touchless technology as an input method, while some are not bold enough to use it. Electronic
device manufacturer such as Samsung, Sony and so on had already released their product that uses this
method as their major way to receive inputs. While these companies had success with their products,
there are some limitations. It lacks of multiple hand control features, which enables many users using
the device in one time. It also cannot be carried onto other platform other than its default platform
itself, which pretty makes curious peoples disappointed. There are some touchless technology programs
too such as the Camera Mouse, Finger Mouse, eViaCam and many more roaming around the internet,
but these programs requires great usage discipline and tight regulations, which is not suitable for daily
usage for average users or newbies.
HovR is a program written in C# language that brings touchless response from the real world straight to
your computer using the computer vision field. It is written to be capable of getting responses according
to the host computer maximum performance capability in order to preserve the host system default
performance. While this program can only run on a system with .Net Framework installed, some users
had been reporting that this program can also be run on Linux and Mac OS X system with the help of
Mono framework with some tweaking applied on the cursor moving code. HovR doesnt use any extra
device other than the built-in webcam, which in some products they require the usage of extra
hardware such as the Microsoft Kinect, iPads special hand tracking dock, electromagnetic field sensors
and so on. This makes HovR very portable. Higher degree of freedom can be achieved when wearing
HovRs special made glove, called HovGlov. With HovGlov, faster response can be achieved as the light
emitted on the finger tips act as a peak points for movement tracking, which enables higher degree of
freedom.

Project HovR
Contestants name : ODell Obrien
School name : Maktab Sabah

Achievements

TV News report recording HovR in action after winning the

Young Inventor Award in Sabah Invention & Design Exhibition
(SINDEX) 2012 held of UMS, Sabah

HovR won the Gold Award on SINDEX 2012 held on last

September in UMS, Sabah

HovRs developer (ODell Obrien) awarded as Young

Inventor Award in SINDEX 2012

Receiving awards in SINDEX 2012 held in UMS.

Project HovR
Contestants name : ODell Obrien
School name : Maktab Sabah

Research Plan
Question/Problem statements :
-

Free hand movement control mechanism had always been computer users dreams.
While the current existing methods do provide a solution to this problem, it lacks of
what computer users really requested, the multiple hand control, which makes
computer control much more free thanks to the nature of human hand movements.

Goals :
-

To provide a free hand movement control methods by using only the built-in hardware
in the target machine such as the webcam.

Description :
In order to provide a touchless, freehand movement control over the computer from an
acceptable distance while still without using any external devices which the user have to buy, I
have made a research about computer vision in daily application usage.
Control can be achieved by tracking the light emitted by the HovGlov, a specialized
pointer kit which resides on the finger in an acceptable rate. To do this, images have to be
streamed from the webcam in 30 frame per second. From the acquired frames, each of the
frames has to be processed in order to retrieve the real-world coordination of the light emitted
by the HovGlov. Diagram below shows in detail of the operational flow :

Project HovR
Contestants name : ODell Obrien
School name : Maktab Sabah

Cursor locations are calculated as :

x = rx * s
y = ry * s
where x is the x-coordinate for the cursor, y is the y-coordinate for the cursor, rx and ry are
respectively the received real-world x and y coordination and s is the movement factor.
Movement factor is calculated as :
s = S / Ws
Where S is the display size and Ws is the acquired webcam frame size.

Below diagram shows the operational flow of the image processing algorithm where the
retrieved frame from the webcam will be processed to produce red spot image.

As these processes are performed in a continuous loop, the user can move the computer cursor
by just moving their hands in front of their monitor which is default, in front of the built-in

Project HovR
Contestants name : ODell Obrien
School name : Maktab Sabah

webcam device. The diagram below shows the comfort area or recommended distance of HovR
usage :

Bibliography:
Below are the resources that are used to evaluate this research :
-

[Book] > Computer Vision : A deeper look

[Book] > Science Form 2 Textbook
[Internet] > http://www.stackoverflow.com/questions/12510714/improving-speed-ofgetpixel-function-in -c-sharp
[Internet] > http://codeproject.com/Articles/35463/Computer-Vision-Application-withC-Part-I
[Articles] > How Computer Vision works? The how and why written by Anne Mornein
from Yahoo! Articles website.

This research heavily uses the concepts, methods, pseudocodes and laws from the book
Computer Vision : A deeper look as it has many information towards computer vision in it
that is mainly written in C++ language.