ICT’s Mark Bolas Featured in Technology Review

Mark Bolas, director of ICT’s Mixed Reality Lab and an associate professor in the USC School of Cinematic Arts, was quoted in a MIT Technology Review story about hands-free computer interfaces made possible by the Microsoft Kinect. “When using a computer today, we think of our bodies as a fingertip or at most two fingertips,” said Bolas. “But humans evolved to communicate with their whole bodies.”
The story noted that Bolas’s research group is experimenting with using Kinect to track very subtle behaviors, including monitoring the rise and fall of a person’s chest to measure breathing rate. Other Kinect-based gesture-controlled interfaces developed at ICT include Jewel Mine, a motor rehabilitation tool created by Belinda Lange of ICT’s game-based rehab group.