Huawei throws R&D dollars at gesture control, cloud storage, being more 'disruptive'

Undeterred by the fact that even humans struggle to interpret certain gestures, Huawei says it's allocating a chunk of its growing R&D budget to new motion-sensing technology for smartphones and tablets. The company's North American research chief, John Roese, told Computerworld that he wants to allow "three-dimensional interaction" with devices using stereo front-facing cameras and a powerful GPU to make sense of the dual video feed. Separately, the Chinese telecoms company is also putting development cash into a cloud computing project that promises to "change the economics of storage by an order of magnitude." Roese provided scant few details on this particular ambition, but did mention that Huawei has teamed up with CERN to conduct research and has somehow accumulated over 15 petabytes of experimental physics data in the process. Whatever it's up to, Huawei had better get a move on -- others are snapping up gesture recognition and cloud patents faster than you can say fa te ne una bicicletta with your hands.