Gestures With Snapdragon S4 Bring Kinect-like Controls to Tablets

Qualcomm wants to bring Kinect-like gesture controls to smartphones and tablets with “Gestures with Snapdragon S4.”

Qualcomm’s new gestures use the front-facing camera on a smartphone or tablet to control what happens on the screen. The result is a simple control method that reminds us of Microsoft’s Kinect.

In the demonstration we saw Qualcomm use the front-facing camera in a tablet to show a game called Header. The app uses the camera to track head movement from left to right. When the user moves their head, the character on-screen moves to block soccer balls which are coming at the screen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QAVLvRsU2A

Later in the demo we see a left-to-right swipe motion used to control a cookbook app. The gestures let users switch between pages in the app without actually touching the device, which is very useful when cooking. Cookbooks are a great use for tablets, but nobody wants to get their tablet or smartphone dirty while they’re cooking.

Gestures with Snapdragon S4, as the name implies, only works with devices that use a Snapdragon S4 CPU. That includes smartphones like the HTC One X on AT&T, HTC One S, and HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE. The features will be available at the end of the year, which might mean current One X and One S owners will get them when they’re released.

There aren’t many situation in which users will want this sort of gesture support on a smartphone or tablet, but it could prove useful from time to time. We fear, however, that Gestures with Snapdragon S4 will turn out just like the Kinect: a cool feature, but ultimately one that has very little support and interest.