Toshiba SpursEngine means hand gestures equal DVD playback controls

Toshiba is mighty proud of their new SpursEngine processing chip, and they should be, its pretty amazing technology. Its based on the same Cell technology at the processor inside your PS3.

They have two really cool products that they were demonstrating at CEATEC this year, one was some sort of real time facial editing, such as being able to change makeup and hairstyles on the two models sitting in front of the camera. That's kind of cool, but not all that practical except maybe in the movie industry. But installed in one of their Qosmio laptops, I am sure all those YouTube users and MySpace whores could find a use for the technology.

On the other hand though, they also had an application that used the SpursEngine and another camera to capture your hand motions and convert them into controls for a DVD player. Now that's a practical, and really cool application for the SpursEngine.

The SpursEngine technology has yet to find its way to market in anything yet, but I am sure it will with all these amazing capabilities. The current processor also has the ability to encode and decode MPEG-2 videos and the prototype currently runs at 1.5GHz.

Toshiba Gadget Reads Hand As Remote [via physorg]