Know someone who talks with their hands so expressively that you have to step back or risk catching a wayward exclamation point in the face? The video after the break will make their day. Students at Duke University have come up with a way to use phone accelerometers to capture gestures with surprising precision, allowing them to pipe those motions through a character recognition algorithm and, hey presto, turn flapping hands into letters and numbers. The prototype app is called PhonePoint Pen, and while right now the process looks painfully slow, with large, precise motions required, with a few months or years of refinements you might just be able to jot down a quick text to a friend w
