A couple of months ago I came across this amusing and interesting video on Italian hand gestures:

I really loved the fact that gestures can be so elaborate. The man in the video made it seem as if certain cultures turned gestures into a language of their own. Since I liked some of the gestures so much, I looked around and found a book on the topic:

Inside the book there were still pictures, and a brief description on how to perform the gestures in the pictures. Although, the pictures were very clear, I felt that there had to be a better way to express these gestures.

The goal of my project is to revisualize some of the pages from Munari’s book using an animatronic hand. I will develop a processing app that can cycle through pages from the book (the description and the picture). This app will trigger the animatronic hand to gesture appropriately based on the gesture displayed on the screen. Overall this is an interactive reading experience.

For some insight on how the animatronic hand will function see this video:

(Ignore the glove that controls the hand in the video. My project will automatically trigger gestures when the pages are cycled)