AirTouch vs Zoom and Teams Built-In Gestures

Here is the short answer. The gesture features built into Zoom and into video calls on a Mac recognize a few hand poses and turn them into reactions, such as a thumbs up emoji or a raised hand. They do not move a cursor, advance a slide, or control shared content. AirTouch is a different layer. It converts hand gestures into mouse, keyboard, and touch input for the whole computer, so you can present, annotate, and navigate any application from across the room, in any meeting platform.

What do Zoom's built-in gestures do?

Zoom's gesture recognition, according to its support documentation, recognizes six gestures: thumbs up, thumbs down, raised hand, an okay sign, a heart, and a double thumbs up. Each triggers the matching meeting reaction, and the last two play a full-screen animation. It needs your video on, your hands visible and away from your face, and reactions enabled by the host. Some gestures are not supported on Linux or mobile.

It is a nice feature. It saves hunting for the reactions button, and it makes a raised hand feel natural again.

What about Microsoft Teams?

Teams reactions are chosen from the React menu in the meeting controls. On a Mac, the operating system adds its own camera reactions, where a hand pose triggers an on-screen effect in video apps including Teams and FaceTime. In both cases the result is an expression in the video call, not control of the computer.

What is AirTouch?

AirTouch is patented gesture control and hand tracking software. It reads your hand through a standard RGB camera and produces the input every application already understands. Raise an open palm and you have the cursor. Pinch to click. Map a gesture to the right arrow and your slides advance, in PowerPoint, Google Slides, a PDF, or a browser. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Android, with macOS on the way.

How do they differ?

• Purpose. Built-in gestures express a reaction. AirTouch controls the computer.

• Scope. Built-in gestures work inside one meeting app. AirTouch works across every application and every meeting platform, because it operates at the operating system level.

• Vocabulary. A handful of fixed poses, compared with fifteen gestures you can map to any shortcut or mouse action.

• Distance. Built-in gestures assume you are seated at a laptop. With AirTouch, sensor range is limited by the camera, not the software, and with a suitable camera it works at 20 feet and beyond. That is the difference between a desk and the front of a boardroom.

• Busy rooms. Patented intent detection identifies the presenter and filters out colleagues who are simply talking with their hands, in most setups.

• Hardware. Both start on a standard camera. Through our partnership with Orbbec, AirTouch also takes advantage of 3D depth sensing and IR cameras when a deployment calls for them. See the Orbbec page.

Where do the built-in gestures win?

• They are free and already installed. Tick a box in settings and you are done.

• They are perfect for reactions. If all you want is a thumbs up without clicking, you do not need anything else.

• They work on a Mac today. AirTouch for macOS is on the way.

Which should you choose?

They also work side by side. Keep Zoom's thumbs up for reactions, and use AirTouch to drive the content you are sharing.

Where to start

Start a free trial before your next presentation and leave the clicker in the drawer. Setup takes about five minutes, as shown in how to install AirTouch on Windows.

Related: touchless meetings in Zoom Rooms and Teams Rooms, AirTouch for Zoom and Teams, AirTouch for PowerPoint, and gesture control for the office.