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What do you think about a radar approach like Google's Project Soli?

• weej 8y ago
  Isn't Soli more for natural user interface (NUI) detection via radar wave disruptions? I'm not sure it would provide very granular detection and he'd have a lot of false positives. I was thinking more in terms of lidar tracking of people. It's been around for nearly a decade and works quite well.
  • guscost 8y ago
    Unfortunately, as far as I know LIDAR is still prohibitively expensive for this. Someone did invent a solid-state LIDAR system recently, which seems like a good sign.
    • weej 8y ago
      Fair point. I was solely thinking from a technical solution not the practicality around deployment. My employer has biased my bubble on thought process. "Oh, yes, this is easy to solve, and I see it on campus (Disney - imagineering office).
  • politician 8y ago
    Right, Soli is built for NUI. However, it does seem like it might fit this use case as well: Distance - I'd imagine that the distance from the top of a door frame to the top of the head of the average shopper is roughly equivalent to the distance from the Soli device to someone's hands. Software - The Soli hardware streams radar contacts to software trained to separate and classify them, not too unlike the approach that Density is already using. Benefits over a CV approach might come in power usage and lower complexity in the contact classification software.
• guscost 8y ago
  I work on the software side, so I can't really comment with authority, but this looks like it could be an interesting lower-frequency/lower-power approach to active sensing. From the preview site, it seems like the "resolution" of this model may be too low to separate and count a crowd of people. However I'll forward this on to the hardware team just in case, thanks!