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Google’s Project Soli radar is sensitive enough to count sheets of paper
- thomasfl 8y agoThis small radard is sensitive enough to identify playing cards by looking at the tiny texture. Looking forward to seeing magicians using this in card tricks. Face ID with hyper sensitive radard should also be very accurate.
- vezycash 8y agoDo facial recognition systems retrain themselves to compensate for change caused by growth or age?
- kyrra 8y agoRandom side-fact: a co-worker who climbs a lot stopped using fingerprint sensors on his phones because his prints change frequently enough due to climbing, that it's basically useless.
- baddox 8y agoMany years ago I had to clock in and out of a job with a fingerprint scanner. I had the same issue because I played acoustic guitar a lot and had thick calluses on my fingers that would occasionally crack.
- excalibur 8y ago> Many years ago I had to clock in and out of a job with a fingerprint scanner. Interesting, I don't think I've ever heard of a company doing this. Was it like a second factor in addition to some type of card reader?
- chc4 8y agoI've also had to do this. Worked at a fairly big healthcare company.
- baddox 8y agoIt was an entry-level IT support job at a US public school district circa 2005. They had just recently installed the scanners at every building. I believe that part-time and hourly employees like custodians, mechanics, groundskeepers, and cafeteria workers were the primary target, but the policy also extended to the tech support department (which was only me).
- mikestew 8y agoMandolin positions your finger such that the callouses form even further onto the fingerprint than with guitar. I gave up on TouchID with my left hand (thumb still worked, though), and FaceID was a nice upgrade.
- baddox 8y agoYeah, I believe at one point I had them rescan with my left thumbprint.
- hnick 8y agoI had continual issues ~20 years ago when I worked nightfill in a supermarket's perishable department. The freezer exposure apparently changed my prints enough that clocking out was an issue.
- kurtisc 8y agoLikewise for weightlifting hook-grip, which squashes your thumbs against the bar's knurling.
- LeftTurnSignal 8y agoI mostly stopped using mine because I have a bad case of hyperhydrosis (sp?), so my fingers are always sweaty / oily enough that none of the devices I use can reliably tell what my prints are. Even when I got printed for the feds (for work reasons), they had to redo most of the fingers.
- jfoutz 8y agoUse a knuckle. I have a similar problem. Works ok.
- takk309 8y agoI climb regularly and can say that I am a bit concerned that the finger print scanner on my Pixel 2 works as often as it does. It makes me wonder if the initial scan of an abused finger means that it will read false positives more often.
- Wowfunhappy 8y agoApple claims their FaceID system does, at least.
- trothamel 8y agoGoogle Photos was able to determine that pictures of my niece as an infant, and pictures of my niece as a 5 year old, are pictures of the same person.
- sigmar 8y agoI've noticed this competency in google photos as well. Though surely it is using the photos of her in between those ages to extrapolate(?)
- Kipters 8y agoAnecdata: I regularly grow a beard and then cut it fully. Windows Hello on my Surface Pro works flawlessy during the growth phase, but it stops working when I cut it off. I guess it adjusts while my beard grows and then it can't recognize me anymore once I don't have it anymore all of a sudden.
- realusername 8y agoI've already seen some magic tricks similar to this with some small HD cameras.
- nmyk 8y agoRichard Turner, self-styled card mechanic, can count and manipulate cards with unbelievable precision by feel alone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwFIJyWKs1k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwFIJyWKs1k He also happens to be blind.
- klodolph 8y agoI'm not sure "self-styled" is quite right here, he is a card mechanic, that's the term for someone who cheats at card games by manipulating cards, and he demonstrates exactly those techniques.
- amelius 8y agoRFID magic cards probably already exist ...
- gdsdfe 8y agoThey do ... That's how they know what each player have in his hands at poker tournament live feeds
- rtkwe 8y agoHmm are you sure? I thought they were just using hole cams still. Little cameras built into the rail or into the table that players just showed their hands to while playing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_cam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_cam
- serf 8y agotheyre both common. rfid/nfc is popular at the moment simply because it's cheaper; no table to cut up or glass/cameras to put everywhere. as a poker player i've always been queezy about the idea that my hand could be read remotely in theory -- but I don't play those kind of tables anyway.
- lathiat 8y agoYep. See here to purchase: http://www.videopokertable.net http://www.videopokertable.net
- gdsdfe 8y agoYep, that's the old tables problem is it's up to the player to show their hands and some either don't care or don't want to reveal their startegy ... I think they even have RFID chips, it makes the game much more televisable
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tcboy88 8y agoactually it doesn't identify each card uniquely, it only counts them.
- Shivetya 8y agoso if I understand this correctly, if it can pass through many materials then does that include clothing? so a passive the target system by which you can determine what they have hidden on their person? what is the range? set it recognize certain shapes, walk past a sensor laden wall, and have it high light in bright green images objects of interest like total recall?
- cvenomz 8y agoThat's how american TSA airport security scanners operate. They use a millimeter wave scanner to identify foreign objects on a person. The only lacking bit is the real-time hollywood-style visualizations.
- nothrabannosir 8y agoInane gos, but I see a Monzo card at 1:35. That means this was very probably developed in the UK? I have to say the branding choice for the colour of that card was a pretty brilliant move.
- michaelmarkell 8y agoTangential, but I can’t find a definition for gos online, is that an abbreviation for something?
- oliveshell 8y agoI figured it was "gossip".
- detritus 8y agogos-sip
- ddalex 8y agoGood spot. > University of St Andrews in Scotland Although the Monzo card makes me think this work also happened in London
- tcboy88 8y agoGreat spot, the blue card is Barclays, black card is CIMB and red card is Maybank.
- jug 8y agoI can’t say I see the win with the from a HCI standpoint. I personally lust for more tactile feedback, not less!
- xlog 8y agoBut you get tactile feedback. Rubbing your fingers together feels very tactile.
- emsy 8y agoThe virtual watch crown in combination with Apples haptic engine would be awesome.
- rtkwe 8y agoThe big gain I see is enabling more controls on smaller devices. Right now physical size is a hard limitation on the number of different control interfaces (buttons or screens or, for future devices with Soli or it's kin on board, gestures), with Soli though the whole volume above the object becomes interface space and the limit is the number of gestures that can be recognized.
- ALittleLight 8y agoI wonder if you could use this for a battery free controller. If you can detect the orientation of thumbsticks on the controller, or whether or not buttons are being depressed, it seems you could have a simple and cheap device for a controller.
- themacguffinman 8y agoThe HCI win doesn't come from making gestures in thin-air, it comes from being able to interpret regular tactile interactions with physical objects. Consider the playing cards example: instead of tapping on digital images of cards, you can now touch and hold physical cards to manipulate a digital system with one convenient sensor.
- BurningFrog 8y agoBut can it see through clothing?
- samstave 8y agointerestingly - they are already integrating this into clothing. Specifically Levis jackets. Source - A close friend of mine is on the Soli team.
- eveningcoffee 8y agoInteresting. What is the range of this device? If its effective range is anything above half a meter then it would raise serious privacy concerns. I can image that different persons would produce a different movement signature when moving into the range of the sensor. It is definitely an interesting device but any additional sensory data at the hands of Google makes me tiny bit more nervous.
- andrewstellman 8y ago> And unlike with object recognition that uses cameras, there are no privacy concerns, or need to maintain line-of-sight or good lighting conditions. Radar works through different materials and in the dark as well as the light. Wait, what? The ability to see through walls and not require line of sight leads to fewer privacy concerns? Seems to me the privacy concerns are significantly greater for radar than facial recognition. Radar can see places that cameras can't, and while it doesn't capture color information, it does capture detailed 3D data that camera-based systems need to interpolate. Plus, you know, the whole working through walls thing. Seems like there are at least as many opportunities for abuse as with facial recognition technology.
- Hupriene 8y agoYeah, I know I'm not super excited about google gaining the ability to continuously monitor the status of my erectile tissue.
- Johnny555 8y agoCan a low power 50Ghz signal penetrate a wall?
- DoctorOetker 8y agowith patience and if designed to detect below the noise floor the power level should not matter
- Digit-Al 8y agoFirstly, I think (though I could be wrong) that when they talk about privacy concerns they mean the sort of concerns the average person would have about having a camera about... I.e. naked or compromising pictures of themselves getting leaked. I would guess this wouldn't be a problem with radar as it doesn't create images. Out of curiosity though, not having much knowledge on the subject myself, what would be your security concerns? I would be genuinely interested in knowing what we should be looking out for, privacy wise, with such technology.
- dcroley 8y agoIf a sheet of paper is roughly .1 mm, then this must be running over 300GHz, or what is more commonly called infrared light, no?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- mediocrejoker 8y agoI think it runs around 60Ghz and uses phased arrays / doppler to make up the rest of the resolution.
- DoctorOetker 8y agogood catch, probably it's not actually resolving the individual card layers, but using the Lambert-Beer law of attenuation, after callibrating on a deck of known number of cards?
- byteface 8y agoThis tech is taking ages to get to market. I worked at a place hired to come up with app ideas for it 5 years ago. I would have expected a pair or bangles by now that give you hands in VR and a finger gestures library.
- bglusman 8y agoI'm wondering about applications of this to robotics? Like, could this replace any of the needs/uses for force-feedback sensors in robotics, and/or for all the cool stuff Dexter[1] is doing to precisely locate it's arm in space with solutions less coupled to the hardware specifics/manufacturing? Could also maybe be really cool way to train robots on really precise behaviors if they can copy with really fine precision exactly what someone does with their hands and fingers, maybe can generalize/learn from a few simple demonstrations really complex interactions if the 3d fidelity is good enough? Dunno, definitely lots of other concerns/questions but robotics and VR/AR stuff come to mind for me and weren't mentioned at all in the article or any of the other comments, curious if any reasons I'm missing why not relevant there. [1]http://hdrobotic.com/dexter/ http://hdrobotic.com/dexter/
- ElijahLynn 8y agoVIDEO HERE > https://youtu.be/FCi56T8X-eY https://youtu.be/FCi56T8X-eY (1:00)
- godelmachine 8y agoThis is fantastic! I remember a talk Pranav Mistry (Director of Samsung Think Tank) gave at TED, which is what Soli turned out to be.
- gdsdfe 8y agoThe developer in me is like : "wow the potential is huge!" And the concerned citizen in me is like :"great another sensor in my pocket!"
- skookumchuck 8y agoCounting sheets of paper can be done very accurately simply by weighing the stack. It's how banknotes are counted.