Kerala Tourism, one of the most active tourism departments of India, has taken technology to a new level by launching a gesture controlled website.
To celebrate the monsoon season and spread the word with travellers, Kerala Tourism has rolled out a website that doesn't need keyboard or mouse to navigate - all it needs is your hand.
User can open the site (works only in Chrome for now), allow the access to use your web camera, swipe your hand to navigate to pages in the site.
Kerala Tourism is known for their strong leverage of digital media to increase traveller foot falls in Kerala, fondly known as "God's own country".
Here is a rough and ready Vine capture to illustrate:
Tnooz interviewed Kerala Tourism's team about this website launch, Q&A with Kenney Jacob below.
Which company developed this website and how the company is associated with Kerala Tourism?
The website is developed by Stark Communications, the official marketing and communications agency of Kerala Tourism Department.
How long did it take to implement this? How many people worked on this?
From concept to final website it took around 3 weeks. We got the idea from an open source piece of code for doing gesture recognition, we improvised on it, combined that with the monsoon campaign and the result is what you are seeing.
How are the customer feedback so far?
People are loving the idea, its getting shared a lot in social media. On Facebook itself the post about this website launch has got about 10,000 likes and 650+ shares.
Any technical or other challenges you faced while implementing this?
This is not as complicated as it seems, gesture recognition technology is already out there in the market with the Xbox kinect and TV sets which you can control with your hand movements.
What is the technology used behind this project?
We use the webcam on your laptop to capture images of your hand, track movements and decide whether to slide pages or not. People who are interested to know more can read about WebRTC.