Pakistani-American's Vision to Revolutionanize User Interfaces
Walking into the local Fry's stores in Silicon Valley during Christmas shopping season, I was fascinated by the latest Xbox 360 demo complete with excited kids dancing in front of a big screen wth a 3D sensor mounted on top of it. Upon closer examination, I learned that Microsoft Xbox 360 has acquired a few new game-changing tricks thanks to the use of the amazing 3D gensture recognition technology from Canesta , a company co-founded in 2002 by my Pakistani-American friend Nazim Kareemi in Silicon Valley. Cyrus Bamji, an Indian-American, and Abbas Rafii, an Iranian-American, are the other members of the Canesta founding team. Just before Christmas 2010, Microsoft started shipping Kinect, a $150 add-on for its Xbox gaming consoles, which uses gesture recognition to allow people to play games with body motions instead of controllers. Players work through menus with hand gestures and then move to make their on-screen avatars run, jump, duck, swing and dance. In fact, Microsoft CEO Ste...