This project lets you play rock, paper, scissors versus your Raspberry Pi, complete with hand gesture recognition

The best Raspberry Pi projects are a lot of fun to use, and they teach you something while you build them. If you’ve ever wondered about using AI to identify hand gestures but are unsure where to get started, why not challenge it to a game of rock, paper, scissors? Not only do you learn how to build an AI system that can detect what hand gesture you’re throwing, but you can put your SBC in its place and beat it at a game or two. It knows what it did.

You, too, can play rock, paper, scissors against your Raspberry Pi 5

In a post on Hackster, tinkerer Citrus posted their new rock, paper, scissors-based SBC project. It uses the Raspberry Pi 5, a Raspberry Pi Touch Display, and the Raspberry Pi AI camera to make a system that can detect what hand sign you’re making.

However, Citrus didn’t want the Raspberry Pi to take what’s on the screen and beam it over to an AI model on an external server to work out what’s happening. Not only does it take a while for the results to come back, but it’d likely cost a fortune to process. The solution? Use all the AI processing hardware on the Raspberry Pi to churn through the data and get a response quicker at no additional cost.

The above video shows the game in action. It seems to be both speedy and accurate when detecting what hand sign you’re throwing. Sure enough, Citrus confirms that the system works very well:

Experimental results show that the model performs excellently, with gesture classification accuracy and recall consistently above 95%. Furthermore, the system demonstrates robust performance across a wide range of environmental conditions, with extremely low latency and efficient real-time processing power, suitable for practical interactive applications such as the rock-paper-scissors game demonstrated. This work provides practical and innovative solutions for low-cost, efficient and robust hand gesture recognition for commercial applications in interactive entertainment, healthcare and smart home systems

While this is a fun project by itself, there are lots of ways you could apply this tech other than playing rock, paper, scissors. For instance, you could allow people with accessibility needs to control technology with a single hand gesture. Here’s hoping people find cool ways to put this tech to use.