Create prezis with gestures

Ever wondered how comfortable it would be to edit your prezi while sitting on the sofa? What if you could just lay back and make presentation by controlling Prezi with voice and hand gestures? Well, we felt the same way—it'd be cool! And that was our project for the last Prezi Hackathon.

We used Kinect to capture the body movements. It has a built-in camera, depth sensor and even voice recognition. We set up a computer that was connected to the Kinect. For the sake of ease we used the official Kinect SDK for communicating with the device. It provides a high level interface and gives back rather precise skeleton coordinates of the user. While Linda, guest participant in our team, started to implement a socket server on the .NET side to send the coordinates through a socket to the Prezi application, Balint, Senior Developer at Prezi, extended the online Prezi editor to accept these coordinates and displayed the left and right hands on the canvas—Maria, our wonderful designer, helped us by creating lovely graphics for them.

As we had limited time in the Prezi Hackathon, we narrowed down the scope of the project to only the hands and some voice commands. We came up with the following idea: in Edit mode, users can interact with Prezi using both hands. If you're slightly further away from the Kinect, you can move freely, but as you move your left hand closer, you can reach out for the canvas and pan it. With your right hand, you can pick up objects on the canvas and can drag them away. And what if the objects are too small? Just say "Prezi, zoom in", or "Prezi, zoom out" to see a wider range of objects. To make these commands really fun, we put together a demo puzzle game.

So do you like it? Or do you think you could have made a cooler hack? Do you have a better idea? Well, join the Prezi team now, and help people share their ideas by making the Prezi experience even more usable and fun!