Your hand is now your mouse.

Back then when Tom Cruise was showing off how to use our fingers to access the computer screen, we all drooled over such a uber-cool technology. But now we have all lived long enough witness it as the technology starts to get uncovered.

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) researchers said that, by using a pair of very simple yet colorful Lycra gloves, with 20 irregularly shaped patches in 10 different colors, applied in front of a webcam, it can generate a unique pattern with every wave of the hand or flex of the finger. Combine that with a database full of gestures and translate that into commands, you can now interact with your computer like Tony Stark did it.

“This gets the 3-D configuration of your hand and your fingers,” says Robert Wang, a graduate student in the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at MIT. “We get how your fingers are flexing.” Wang developed the system with Jovan Popović, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

So, is Microsoft’s Natal and Sony’s Move based on this? Or they are using some million dollar research instead?