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Project Soli – touchless gesture interactions by Google
- alex_duf 10y agoI may be old school but for every example given in the video, I would rather have an actual button to press...
- elsewhen 10y agothe physical size of buttons/knobs/sliders requires devices to be large enough to accommodate those elements. with a chip like soli, designers can create devices that are dramatically smaller. as the soli gets smaller (which future versions likely will), you can imagine tiny devices that maintain rich interactivity.
- 0x6c6f6c 10y agoExactly. I also prefer physical buttons but imagine what could be done in terms of reducing space taken by controls alone. This is in many ways vastly better than touchscreen interfaces since it will allow for many different kinds of interaction in the same space.
- kevincox 10y agoHowever if you have a button, you have a button. With this you can have a button, or a dial, or a slider or sliders in the other two directions. And which you have switches with the context.
- ch4s3 10y agoThis seems like it could be really interesting for home automation and accessibility projects.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- awesomerobot 10y agoI'm sure a lot of consumer implementations come to mind pretty quickly for most, but this could be really huge for accessibility... if you could say, train gestures tailored to the very specific nuances of a person's available range of motion. Avoiding the limitations tied to physical hardware would be huge.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoI wonder if this could be used for some kind of modified eye/eyelid tracking?
- awesomerobot 10y agoThat could be interesting, eye tracking is often expensive and can require a "just-right" type of setting. Reducing that barrier can be huge for many. I think outside of a single solution like eye-tracking there's a lot of room for a device like this to be much more adaptable to a broad range of conditions. There's so much variation of how physical symptoms can present, even within a single disease, that it can be really difficult (and expensive) to customize hardware for an individual... and degenerative diseases can take constant readjustment and new hardware. The hardware barrier seems endlessly frustrating — you have an off-the-shelf device like a joystick/keyboard/mouse that was originally designed for hands, being used by feet and with mouths... ...a good example of hardware reduction making a meaningful impact was the advent of reliable portable touchscreens — people could actually start directly touching the interface without some of the ergonomic constraints of a mouse and keyboard. You can reliably surf the web on an iPad using your nose. Imagine trying to do the same with an off-the-shelf joystick or mouse.
- melling 10y agoIt could also be huge for ergonomics. Many people develop RSI issues through repeated keyboard and mouse usage. People have as gone as far as using their nose as an input device: http://www.looknohands.me http://www.looknohands.me There are lots of other RSI stories here: https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README.org https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README...
- Tinyyy 10y agoCould this be used to create an “Air Keyboard” that allows you to type by pretending to type into the air?
- teddyh 10y agoRemember the gorilla arm. http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html
- eximius 10y agoWith the size of the chip, its possible to make a wearable on the wrist to capture the finger input so your arms can face anywhere.
- digi_owl 10y agoHmm, that and AR and you have some interesting potential. A wrist worn device pr hand that can track individual fingers. Thus freeing up the hand to still do grasping and such.
- digi_owl 10y agoThe problem there, as i see it is twofold. 1. the screens were mounted upright. Notice how keyboard are nearly flat by comparison. 2. touchscreens thus far can't tell a finger resting from a finger pressing. So while a near flat screen avoids much of the gorilla arm issue, longer durations will put strain on the wrists.
- dragonwriter 10y agoThe technology looks like it might be able to, though the focus is finger-on-finger interactions so that there is haptic feedback, which "air keyboard" doesn't provide. OTOH, if it is precise enough, you might be able to make a virtual chorded keyboard / keyer [0] with it using finger-on-finger or finger-on-hand gestures. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorded_keyboard
- dizzydot 10y agoIt is truly amazing to see the photograph of the huge and complicated prototype that they managed to put on a chip in under 2 years.
- Aelinsaar 10y agoThis, plus mature augmented reality, minus device's screen... that could start to get very interesting. Maybe something like a wearable (iWatch or some such) with this, plus an AR interface creating a 'virtual screen' to interact with. For my full sized device though, buttons have serious advantages that don't go away until the motion sensing is hooked up to a REALLY smart computer.
- calebm 10y agoReminds me of the Leap (https://www.leapmotion.com/ https://www.leapmotion.com/)
- melling 10y agoThe Leap Motion uses infrared light. It was hugely disappointing at first. Supposedly it got much better after the Orion SDK release. http://blog.leapmotion.com/orion/ http://blog.leapmotion.com/orion/ Here are a few other ideas gesture devices like the Mylo, FingerIO, and Intel Real Sense: https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README.org#gesture-computing https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README...
- StavrosK 10y agoWhy was it hugely disappointing? I've had one since the start and it was always very accurate, precise and reliable. It had some issues with not being able to persist in tracking hidden fingers, but it worked really really well on extended ones.
- Qworg 10y agoYour setup must be near perfect then. There was an unacceptable level of noise and disappearing fingers once you rotated past 30 degrees of level in the original versions. Orion is almost magically better.
- codezero 10y agoFor me it was hugely disappointing because they passed the API off to individual applications rather than providing some OS level drivers for a common API so you could drop it in place of other interaction devices. That, and it used an immense amount of CPU resources on my computers.
- nicholasjarnold 10y agoThanks for the heads up on Orion. I bought a Leap Motion at it's initial release, and like some others here was disappointed in it's ability to accurately track my fingers/hands. I just might pull it off the shelf and give it another shot now.
- honkhonkpants 10y agoHas anything happened on this since it was announce a year ago?
- guelo 10y agoAt Google I/O a couple weeks ago they said they had miniaturized the Soli chip and they demoed a smartwatch with the chip in the wrist band, as well as a gesture-controlled speaker. They announced the Soli beta dev kit coming "next year". You can watch starting around 21:40 here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LO59eN9om4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LO59eN9om4
- neves 10y agoI want one of these in my glass so my desktop computer would put the focus on the screen I'm looking.
- kevincox 10y agoThis can be done today, and probably more accurately with a webcam.
- sourthyme 10y agoThe video suggests that using radar they can more accurately track hand motions than using a camera.
- kevincox 10y agoIt depends what you are tracking. They specifically said that they could more accurately track depth. For eye motion tracking I suspect that depth isn't a major component and the 2D image is better to track eye motion, especially because the pupil has very little change in depth compared to the surrounding area on the eyeball.
- neves 10y agoDon't miss the video. They made a great job demonstrating the interactions with nice visualizations. You can watch it in 1.5x speed with subtitles. Very cool.
- soperj 10y agoWatching the gestures reminds me of a theremin.
- neoteo 10y agoAs always Douglas Adams had some keen, if slightly cynical, insight: "The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme." Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
- Touche 10y agoThis is an incredibly exciting technology! My first concern is how can these gestures be discovered? Will we just get used to the same sorts of gestures in different applications over time and intuit what to do?
- dskhatri 10y agoThe radar chip central to Project Soli is developed by Infineon Technologies http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/ http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/ http://www.infineon.com/dgdl/InfineonGoogleSoliFAQEnglish.pdf?fileId=5546d46154cc971b0154cf4336930008 http://www.infineon.com/dgdl/InfineonGoogleSoliFAQEnglish.pd...
- Dwolb 10y agoHow's Google's Biz Dev? Selling B2B is a whole new ball game for Google (outside of Adwords which is a special case since it is so valuable to advertisers). I'd be very wary as a purchaser of this chip on how long Google et. al. have committed to producing it and their willingness to move up the value chain (i.e. does Google have a good chance of copying me if I come up with something valuable?). The Infineon relationship may help in both cases since they have solid analog products