Las week we announced that we released the Flow Breakout board. During the week we also played a bit with the board and the outcome is a hackster project that describes how to make a Touchless Mouse using the flow breakout.
The idea is that we can detect the proximity of the hand with the ranging sensor contained in the flow breakout and detect how the hand is moving with the optical flow sensor. The flow sensor is very similar to an optical mouse sensor so we are just inverting the concept to move the environment (the hand) instead of moving the flow sensor against a table. Using an Arduino Leonardo our hack is recognized as a regular mouse by any computer.
As a result, it works quite well but it requires some training to get the mouse to go where we want. We would not use this as our regular pointing device any time soon but we think is a nice example of what can be achieved with the flow breakout board: