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Peripherals - Friday, December 14, 2007

Brad Feld Joins $8.8M Round In Stealthy Movement Tracking Startup Oblong Industries

LA-based Oblong Industries wants us to think about replacing the mouse, just as Tom Cruise did in the sci-fi film Minority Report where he uses his hands to grab data. Oblong has raised around $8.8M in Series A funding led by Foundry Group, says PEWire. Brad Feld and Ryan McIntyre of Foundry have taken board seats. Oblong Industries calls itself the first commercial gesture recognition company. It plans to license its human gesture-based operating system to qualified development partners in various industries. The typical setup uses a set of cameras and matching hardware that can track 3D positions. With the help of gloves, the system infers the user's hand and finger positions and orientations. These are finally parsed by Oblong's proprietary gesture recognition engine where they are interpreted. Oblong is run by John Underkoffler who has worked on human machine interfaces at MIT's Media Lab for over two decades. Underkoffler was actually a technology adviser to Steven Spielberg for Minority Report. Oblong wants to make the futuristic scenes in Minority Report seem not so far out. View - site alarm:clock recently reported on an Oblong competitor Gesturetek which is already in commercial production. View - Oblong site... Continue...