Control a Computer With Hand Gestures and a Webcam

Here's the part the hardware companies would rather you not know: you do not need to buy anything to control a computer with your hands. The camera on your laptop is already good enough.

For a decade, gesture control shipped with a tax. A depth sensor clipped to the monitor. An infrared bar taped below the screen. A headset. Every one of them turned "wave your hand" into a procurement project, and most of them ended up in a drawer.

AirTouch takes the other path. Our patented computer-vision models read your hands from a standard RGB webcam and map what they see to the mouse, keyboard, and touch inputs your operating system already speaks. A pinch is a click. A wave is a scroll. The app you're driving has no idea a camera is involved, because to the app it's just input.

How it actually works

1. Install AirTouch and point any webcam at yourself.

2. Open the gesture library and map each gesture to a click, key press, or touch event.

3. Open your app and use it. Nothing to integrate, nothing to recompile.

That's usually about five minutes from download to your first working gesture.

"But my webcam isn't special"

That's the point. If it streams video, AirTouch's hand tracking works with it: the laptop camera, a cheap USB cam, your phone, most IP cameras. There's no depth sensor requirement for typical use. The intelligence lives in the model, not in a bracket you have to buy.

And because our intent detection is patented, casual movement doesn't hijack your screen. The software separates a deliberate gesture from a hand that just happened to drift into frame, so you control the computer when you mean to.

Why we build it this way

The AI industry spends most of its energy trying to remove the human from the loop. We think that's a failure of imagination. The webcam gesture control in AirTouch exists to do the opposite: give your own hands more reach, on the hardware you already own, without asking you to wear or buy a thing.

Try it on the camera in front of you right now. Start a free trial.

Related: gesture control and hand tracking software and every AirTouch feature.