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Google wins U.S. approval for radar-based hand motion sensor
- Cieplak 8y agoInteresting tidbit: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said in an order late on Monday that it would grant Google a waiver to operate the Soli sensors at higher power levels than currently allowed.
- gammateam 8y agoI want this power
- raverbashing 8y agoWhich is how many mW at which frequency (~ 60GHz according to article)?
- wbl 8y ago57 GHz? What sort of parts are they using to get a consumer product BOM cost?
- pmorici 8y agoNo idea what they are using but TI makes a bunch of parts that do radar in the MM wave band which is what that frequency is in. http://www.ti.com/sensors/mmwave/overview.html http://www.ti.com/sensors/mmwave/overview.html
- wbl 8y agoSo I just looked up the prices on Mouser and Digikey for an amplifier or mixer in those frequencies, and boy are they expensive. The R&D spend must be enormous for them not to be making those parts in these frequencies as separate bits.
- apcragg 8y agoI mean, you can make a RADAR with a single transistor, 2 diodes, an exotic but off the shelf VCO, and clever transmission lines. I doubt the R&D cost is very high for for the MMIC here.
- madengr 8y agoTI is making a 60 GHz RADAR in a CMOS process. I’m sure R&D costs were heavy, but production will be cheap. https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333330 https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333330
- valverde 8y agoIt's a custom-built chip according to https://atap.google.com/soli/ https://atap.google.com/soli/
- walterbell 8y agoThey are working with Infineon, https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/ https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/ Infineon has a 24Ghz demo board for $150, https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Infineon-Technologies/DEMOSENSE2GOLTOBO1?qs=rU5fayqh%252bE1u6j6iJNnMAA%3d%3d https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Infineon-Technologies/D... & https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/sensor/radar-sensor-ics/24ghz-radar/ https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/sensor/radar-sensor-...
- madengr 8y agoScrew Infineon. They won’t provide the data sheet for their 80 GHz chipset, despite my buying $5k worth through their distributor.
- SlowRobotAhead 8y agoInfineon support is truely world-class awful. I’m looking at 100k with them this year and can’t get an answer to any technical question in any time frame. I probably wouldn’t select them again.
- jpalomaki 8y agoVideo from Google about the technology (2015): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QNiZfSsPc0
- lawrenceyan 8y agoGo big or go home. That's one thing I like about Google/Alphabet. Not being afraid to try completely new things outside the normal comfort zone of their traditional product space, and aiming for the most radical potentially game changing ones at that. I'm glad that Sergey and Larry have been able to stay at the helm, keeping Google/Alphabet from devolving into just another short term quarterly earnings chasing company and continuing to set up institutions in place that will ensure the culture of innovation which has made the company so successful lasts long into the future.
- kkarakk 8y agoGo big, let your product stagnate for a couple of years coz it doesn't improve adsense dollar revenue in a direct way and then go home. reminder that inbox is getting the shotgun to the head this year while gmail still feels like it's stuck in the early 2010s and that's just the most recent one. any area that google dominates in nowadays feels almost accidental, like they don't actually want to dominate that area but the alternatives don't have their datacentres and thus aren't as good-for eg youtube.
- blfr 8y agoThis is, sadly, an accurate comment. Although to be fair to Google, they ported snoozing to regular Gmail and polished the UI a little.
- glenrivard 8y agoWhat product/service? Seems like they win a segment and keep pushing which was not the way of the past.
- kace91 8y agoPopular wisdom is that google culture rewards too much the creation of new projects, but not as much their maintenance - which looks comparatively worse in a CV or when being considered for raises. Since they also hire mostly high-achievers, the result is that everyone wants to move into new things and "old" products are soon left to wither. I'd be curious to know the opinion of actual Googlers about this common theory.
- tb303 8y agoFWIW this is from the ATAP group @ google, which is DARPA -> Motorola -> Google. Not Google X/moonshot/rollerblades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_ATAP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_ATAP I've seen the tech first-hand and it's super cool.
- mcny 8y agoThank you for mentioning this. My initial reaction when I saw this was a chilling sadness of "who did Google X screw over to get this?" I hope the whole Google X nonsense gets scrapped. Doing things like they do has a real chilling effect on sharing of ideas.
- ForHackernews 8y agoCan you expand on this comment a little more? Why does it matter which division of Alphabet corp makes something?
- burgerboy 8y agoCause Google is bad mmmkay don't question the hive mind
- madengr 8y agoYouTube can censor your videos, but Google fiber can’t, though they are under the same umbrella.
- Buge 8y agoCensorship isn't really a product. Also a website censoring itself vs an ISP censoring a website can be thought of as different actions. A website developing a hand sensor vs an ISP developing a hand sensor seem essentially the same. (Censor vs sensor pun not intended.)
- chaser7016 8y agoNot sure why mcny comment is downvoted as seen in the thread above and other articles in Wired and elsewhere... Google X and ATAP blatantly steals innovation/technology and claims it as its own.
- buboard 8y agohow precise are those sensors? The videos show use cases where gestures are used as a selector , but how does this perform when drawing for example?
- docbrown 8y agoOne area in which I think this could be big: deaf culture. Instead of a device being triggered by voice, you can trigger commands by spelling them out via ASL and hoping NL can predict wisely or give choices -> wait for users response signal.
- thfuran 8y agoI don't think something like this will be capable of handling ASL any time soon.
- lupire 8y agoThere's an app for that. https://motionsavvy.com/uni.html https://motionsavvy.com/uni.html The OP is more about 3-d recognition of mimed actions like turning dials and pushing buttons (Virtual Reality applications) than recognizing symbols.
- baybal2 8y agoI remember gesture controlled light switches, and other home automation being a thing at least since eighties. Yet again, this fires up my skepticism about soundness of American patent system.
- jsmeaton 8y agoDetecting some motion with a sensor and detecting precise motion using radar is very different. It’s a novel use of technology, and I’m for one perfectly happy with this kind of invention being patentable.
- baybal2 8y agoDo you understand that the difference there is not much bigger than detecting motion gesture, and detecting notion gesture and claiming doing that precisely? Both things require mm waveradar and some non-trivial DSP functionality to recognise gesture from clutter, and both have to be calibrated to significant precision. This is the that glaring flaw of current patent system where there can be 20 very similar products, but all covered by different patents with only difference being verbage on the patent.
- lupire 8y agoWhat are some of these gesture-control systems that you remember? All I've seen are The Clapper and motion sensors.
- tootie 8y agoHaving spent a fair bit of time looking into applications for gesture inputs (kinect and leap motion mostly) I can tell you the hardest part by far will the user experience design. Gestures are extremely unintuitive on their own. Users need really clear prompts and/or training to understand how to use them. And if you want to innovate and create new and subtle gestures as your product evolves, it only gets worse. The leap motion is already pretty good and has some useful applications, but it's still very, very niche. The Soli looks like a real evolution of the technology in terms of both precision and how embeddable it is, but it's going to have the same challenges in user adoption. I'd expect this kind of thing to get more traction in industry than in people's homes.
- microcolonel 8y agoI figure the only reliable way to extract gesture intents is to define them abstractly (as a set of drawings or what have you), have a large number of people try to execute them, and then design/learn the detector based on that.
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoI've worked in this space for educational software. You hit the nail on the head. Detecting what people do with their hands is easy. Building a UX out of that is hard.
- sizzle 8y agoMicrosoft Hololens does a great job with gesture input onboarding and discoverability/usability in context of virtual keyboard use.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoConcur. Even screen based gestures, rather simple ones, when they are not standard or common, tend to be difficult to acquire. Every time I switch phones, I'm lost in the semantics, and don't care to learn the new ones so much. It's almost a matter of standards than anything - if everyone could really agree what '3 fingers this or that' meant ... we'd already all be doing it.
- natch 8y agoWhy do they even need approval? Isn’t it really short range?
- zamadatix 8y agoThe article covers this in detail, was there something that wasn't clear?
- canada_dry 8y agoAs an aging techie this is just the kinda new thing that will probably terrify me in 10 years from now! Just like the desktop GUI confounded our grandparents... we'll be faced with a machine that recognizes gestures. Not wanting to do something unintended, we'll want to avoid these things just like our ancestors!
- everdev 8y agoA few years ago Google released a video about controlling Gmail with gestures, as an April Fool's joke...
- roywiggins 8y ago> A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. 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 program. > Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again. http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329 http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329
- SN76477 8y agoI find gestures exhausting.
- DonnyV 8y ago> Facebook Inc (FB.O) raised concerns with the FCC that the Soli sensors operating in the spectrum band at higher power levels might have issues coexisting with other technologies. Why did Facebook have a say in this? Are they building one too?
- TomMarius 8y agoI'm not really sure about this in US, so take it with a grain of salt. In my country anyone can raise concerns before something like this is approved.
- supergeek133 8y agoIt's roughly the same in the US. Typically when changes are made to a government accepted standard/radio frequency rules all of the currently participating organizations are given a chance to review/debate changes.
- glibgil 8y agoFacebook has a policy of creating bad publicity for their competitors. It’s Sheryl Sandberg’s idea
- techntoke 8y agoI have this this exact technology documented from 2014, except my idea uses RFID. Could literally make anything touch-enabled, included existing touchless monitors.
- trumped 8y agoGoogle already has a pretty good idea of what you are doing at all times using the sensors in your phone... this will give them even more information about you... I hope at least that this new tech won't be able to read you from the next room (through walls).
- politician 8y agoImagine this in a bracelet form factor that puts multiple sensors in a loop around your forearm which it uses to locate and sense the position of the opposite hand. VR/AR use cases suffer from poor input controls; this might be a better approach.
- eaandkw 8y agoSo with this technology will Google be able to scan anything in the room, including the gestures? If this technology is used the same way microphones are used in IOT devices like Alexa I have some concerns.
- buttslasher69 8y agoCan this be used as short range SLAM