Smart Rooms: Machine Understanding of Human Action
Alex Pentland
MIT
3:30 am Mon. May 6 in AB20 Weeks Hall
The Perceptual Computing Section of the Media Laboratory is working to
make computers that understand people, and can work with them in the
manner of an attentive human-like assistant. To this end we have
built a series of interactive office spaces - ``smart rooms'' -
that are used as real-time experimental testbeds. Smart rooms are
instrumented with cameras and microphones, and perform audio-visual
interpretation of human users. Real-time capabilities include 3-D
tracking of head, hands, and feet; ``holographic'' audio; face
recognition; and interpretation of face and hand gestures. People in
the space can control programs, browse multimedia information, and
experience shared virtual environments without wires or special
goggles.