BANGALORE: Hewlett Packard's touch screen PCs are out and what can be the next now? Gestures based PCs?

Yes, this can be a reality, though not very shortly, according to director of HP Labs India, Ajay Gupta. The HP Labs India, which is one of seven global sites, is working on developing the "real" PCs of tomorrow that can understand and react to human gestures.

There has been a lot of progress made in developing a gesture interface. A lot of work on making the machine recognize speech is already there. "We are also moving towards three-dimensional gaze," Gupta said.

Developing gesture-based interface for PCs is one of major projects taken up by HP Labs in India. "A lot of progress in being made in project but it will take quite some time before we come out with a release," the HP Labs India director said.

The other major projects the HP Labs India has on its radar include a project on the integration of paper and digital world. The project envisages on digitalizing paper works, extending the Document Image Processing to Indian scripts.

HP Labs India is also working on a project for simplification of Web. The project will help customers to get tailor made content from various Web sources on different devices, thus bringing more value to customers.

The HP Labs India director said that after the recent revival of projects of HP's 23 focused labs, 30 big bets had been identified which cluster around five broad themes that include; Information explosion, Dynamic cloud services, Content transformation, Intelligent infrastructure and sustainability.

It has been decided to focus the energies on perusing these big bets and HP Labs research spans a wide range of technical disciplines and touches all of HP's businesses. HP Labs is applying its expertise in areas to address the five opportunities that are crucial to defining and further of information technology.

Innovation Research Program

In order to attract creative talent HP Labs has announced starting of HP Labs Innovation Research program. The program creates opportunities at colleges, universities and research institutes around the world including India for breakthrough collaborative research with HP.

Under this innovation research program the HP Labs has invited the worldwide academic community to submit proposals related to current research in the focus areas its research.

Awards under the program will consist of cash support for one year in the $50,000 to $75,000 range, including any overhead. A key element of each award will be on-campus support for one graduate-student researcher.