Cube26’s ‘natural vision control’ lets you mute video by placing a finger to your lips

Imagine being able to mute your TV by shushing it or pausing a video simply by getting up. If Cube26 has its way, such interactions will come to TVs and smartphones in the near future.

CEO Saurav Kumar said today at CES 2013’s Eureka Park that he believes Cube26’s “natural vision control” could revolutionize how we interact with all manner of smart devices.

“Lots of smart devices are coming to the market, and everyone wants to get better at interacting with these devices — especially companies like Apple, Samsung, and Microsoft,” Kumar said. “We’re trying to make the machine learn how humans interact so it can naturally interact with them.”

Interactions that Cube26 can already manage on a TV include:

• Mute: silence a video by placing a finger to your lips.
• Pause: Hold your hand up to pause a video stream.
• Presence detection: If you get up and move out of the room, the video pauses. It resumes as soon as you are back in front of the set.
• Facial recognition: Detect and catalog your emotions based on your facial gestures.

Kumar thinks the practical applications of his technology are bountiful — like how Netflix could use it to learn what videos you like based on your facial expressions.

“Netflix has good recommendations, but it could be more personal. Every time I’m watching this one show, I like it and it could feed that emotional information back to the app,” he said.

Cube26 is working on other gestures as well, including volume controls and selection of items in an application.

Kumar said his company has signed one big customer so far to use its tech, but he could only say it is “one of the largest Japanese electronics companies.”

“They are developing their retail marketing product line and using it inside shops and stores,” Kumar said. “They want to know if that person is a male, female, happy, etc. It could used be for product placement or other things.”

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Cube26 was founded in January. It changed its name from PredictGaze to Cube26 a few days ago.

Check out the video below to see Cube26 in action.