The iPad is great, but the one thing it doesn’t have is the ability to recognize gestures. That would sure come in handy when in the kitchen making recipes, so you can keep your screen smudge free. Elliptic Labs to the rescue.

The company has been working on its 3D gesture interface for years and it is finally ready to show off an actual product in the form of a motion-sensing iPad dock prototype making its debut at CES in a few weeks. It gives you full control without having to touch your device at all.

Gesture based technology just got a whole lot more colorful thanks to this MIT student’s ultra colorful Lycra gloves. Robert Wang and his faculty adviser Jovan Popovićt are the designers of this colorful project. The color sections on the gloves allow for a full range of hand gestures to be recognized by the computer system.

It also helps the system better recognize your hands as 3D shapes. A Webcam is used to capture the gloves, while software recognizes and translates the color patterns and compares the patterns to a database of hand gestures. After finding a match, it generates a virtual 3-D model.

Mgestyk Technologies wants to bring gesture control to your home PC. They want to do it by using just a 3D camera and proprietary software. The Mgestyk gesture control system is can capture small hand movements and then translate them into commands. The commands can be applied to nearly all windows applications, but more importantly video games. It looks like it works pretty nice, but it looks like there’s some lag. It’s also a bit dorky looking shooting a gun. Pricing is expected to be around $150. No details on availability just yet, but you can sign up on their mailing list to get updates.

Toshiba’s got a new Qosmio. The G55. It should go on sale next month with a price of $1,550. Some specs include an 18.4-inch (1680 x 945) display, Centrino 2 CPU, GeForce 9600M GT, 4GB of RAM, dual drives, and the “Quad Core HD processor”. The interesting thing however is the camera-based visual gesture control system. Seems like they’re taking a page from the Wii playbook.

On one hand it looks a bit frustrating and you need to have steady hands, plus it apparently is hell on the wrists. Then again it could be very useful for a number of applications. Either way, we’re talking about a laptop with motion control. Of course, we want one.