Gesture recognition using Kinect in a virtual classroom environment

In an E-learning classroom, students and professors are at different geographic locations. In the present E-learning system, the professor and the student interact with each other through simple internet applications. The disadvantage in this type of classroom set-up is that students in a remote location will not receive the same attention as those ones in a real classroom. Students in a remote location will only be seen on a small screen and the clarity of the video might be poor. Furthermore, the professor in a real classroom might focus only on students who are interacting face-to-face with him. The professor may not know the details of the remote students and how well they understand his class lecture. To solve this problem, this paper describes a system, based on Kinect^TM, to make the E-learning class lecture more interactive for the remote students. For example, when a student in a remote location, raises his/her hand to talk to a professor, the Kinect camera detects the student, identifies the gesture of the remote student, zooms onto the remote student, and displays details such as his/her name and background of study. Thus the professor can pay equal attention to both the remote and local students.