First development kit for integrated 2D PCAP and 3D gestures on displays

Announced as the industry’s first development kit for integrated 2D projective-capacitive touch (PCAP) and 3D gesture recognition on displays, the 2D/3D Touch and Gesture Development Kit (DV102014) has been unveiled by Microchip. The kit is designed to provide designers with easy access to Microchip’s patented 2D and 3D GestIC sensing technology, allowing them to easily integrate 2D multi-touch and 3D hand gesture recognition into their display applications. The use of electric-field based technology now enables hand and finger gestures to be tracked both on the display surface as well as above at a distance of up to 20 cm. In addition, the development kit provides an easy-to-use, ‘out-of-the-box’ experience that requires no code development. Parameterisation, diagnostics and optional settings are done through Aurea 2.0, a free downloadable graphical user interface (GUI). The 2D/3D Touch and Gesture Development Kit features Microchip’s latest PCAP controller, the MTCH6303, with the MGC3130 3D gesture controller. It includes an eight-inch transparent touch sensor to enable rapid prototyping for widely available displays. The MTCH6303 provides multi-touch coordinates with a five-finger scan rate of 100 Hz. In addition, it has an integrated multi-finger surface gesture suite which makes it a good fit both for Operating System (OS) driven applications as well as embedded systems without an operating system. The MGC3130 with Microchip’s award-winning GestIC technology was the first electrical-field-based 3D gesture controller to offer low-power, precise, and robust hand position tracking at 200Hz. In addition, GestIC technology uses advanced Hidden Markov Models to ensure that the recognition rate for 3D hand gestures is above 95%. Free-space hand gestures are universal, hygienic and easy to learn, making them ideal for display applications, says the company.