Chan Wing Hong, Phillip, a graduate of the Electronic and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department and currently an MPhil student, has won the Merit Award in Best of Tertiary Student Project in the Asia Pacific ICT Alliance Awards (APICTA) 2014. 

The awarding-winning project is named “Gesture Input Device”, and it captures the motion of our hands so that we could control the computers remotely. Phillip’s inspiration comes from several sci-fi movies. Like most of the science and technology lovers, he was totally amazed by the futuristic gesture control technology demonstrated in the films. The device is much more human-friendly than conventional input devices (eg. mouse and keyboard) because it is controlled by our intuition, and physically it is much better for our wrists and fingers. The design is also beneficial to disabled people, for instance speech impaired people could communicate with those who do not know sign language via a sign language translation system. After spending 9 months on its development, Phillip is now planning to further advance the device for particular applications. 

The APICTA Awards is widely regarded as the “Oscars” of the ICT arena which gathers the most remarkable innovations from all over the world. Each year there is only one award winner in the Best of Tertiary Student Project category, while this is the 4th Merit Award won by HKUST students who represent Hong Kong in the past 5 consecutive years.