CSU researchers land $2.1M DARPA grant to develop gesture technology

FORT COLLINS — A team of Colorado State University researchers recently received a $2.1 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop technology that would enable computers to recognize non-verbal commands such as gestures, body language and facial expressions.

The goal is to be able to some day allow people to communicate more easily with computers in noisy settings or when a person is hearing-impaired or speaks another language.

“Current human-computer interfaces are still severely limited,” CSU professor of computer science Bruce Draper, who is leading the project, said in a release from the school. “First, they provide essentially…