Qualcomm acquires GestureTek to prevent smudging our touchscreens with chicken finger grease

With the acquisition of GestureTek, Qualcomm gets access to 25 years of intellectual property in the gesture recognition area, and plethora of engineering resources.

The mobile chipset maker says it will introduce the gesture recognition technology in the next generation of its system-on-a-chip Snapdragon family. We've seen some gesture-based navigation demoed by XTR and rival Texas Instruments way back last year, but things should have advanced even more by now.

We are curious what will Qualcomm come up with here. In the case of a cell phone or tablet, the front-facing camera should be the standard gesture-recognition tool involved. The next Snapdragons based on the ARM Cortex-A15 "Eagle" architecture will certainly be powerful enough to read any hand or finger movement you throw at them, so we can finally stop smudging our precious touchscreens with finger grease and ketchup.

Have a look at the XTR gesture navigation demoed on TI's OMAP4 mobile development platform in the video below, for a hint at what's to come with Qualcomm's next Snapdragons. GestureTek has fitted its technology for mobiles running Android and Symbian, but knowing that Qualcomm should be powering the Nokia Windows Phone handsets, we might see gesture-based navigation implemented there as well.

source: Qualcomm