My new landing page at www.oerum.org is an interactive Hand Letters interface that tracks your hand in real time to translate geometric gestures into a 29 character alphabet.
Intention
This is an experiment in constructing new relationships between bodies and machines. Rather than borrowing from existing sign languages, the project invents a gestural alphabet from scratch, mapping letters to spatial properties like finger count, spread angle, palm orientation, and position in frame.
The interface is deliberately clunky. Gestures fail to register, the camera misreads your hand, letters appear when you did not mean them. Imagine if this were your primary way of interfacing with digital technology. The friction is the point: it makes visible the labour and awkwardness we have learned to ignore in keyboards, touchscreens, and mice. Every interface is a strange negotiation between what bodies can do and what machines can perceive. This one just refuses to hide it.
The Technology
The interface is built on MediaPipe Hands, a machine learning pipeline developed by Google Research in 2020 for real time hand tracking. It runs directly in the browser using WebGL for GPU acceleration.
The system extracts 21 landmark coordinates per hand at approximately 30 frames per second.
Palm Detection Model: A BlazePalm detector locates the hand using a single shot anchor based architecture optimised for mobile inference.
Hand Landmark Model: A regression network predicts 21 3D keypoints (wrist, thumb, and four fingers with four joints each) from the cropped hand region.
Gesture Classification: Custom logic analyses derived features including finger extension states via y coordinate comparison, inter finger Euclidean distances, z depth differentials for palm orientation, and normalised frame position to match configurations against the invented alphabet.
The Danish letters Æ, Ø, and Å are included: two hands visible, circle with thumb raised, and fist held high.
Privacy
All processing runs client side. No images or landmark data leave your device.
Write with your hands: www.oerum.org
