For the first time, two prototypes of products controlled exclusively through gestures were demonstrated at Google I/O, a smartwatch and a wireless speaker. Both devices can recognize gestures that replace switches or buttons with this revolutionary concept. Infineon Technologies and Google ATAP enabled these features with their technologies.
According to Ivan Poupyrev, Technical Project Lead at Google ATAP - Gesture sensing offers a new opportunity to revolutionize the human-machine interface by enabling mobile and fixed devices with a third dimension of interaction. This will fill the existing gap with a convenient alternative for touch and voice controlled interaction.
There are lots of approaches to using augmented reality for fusing physical and simulated reality. But what’s been missing till now is a fast, intuitive transmission of commands to the computer. To date, much of the focus has been on touch sensitive screens. These, however, mean the user needs to be in constant “close contact” with the computer. On the other hand, there’s speech recognition: This allows greater flexibility, but it’s largely limited to individual users and there are problems with different ascents.
Gesture-based control of devices by hand signals closes this gap. Gestural is the 3rd dimension. This technology was developed by Google ATAP and Infineon over the last few years under the internal name “Soli”. A 9 x 12.5 mm radar chip from Infineon sends and receives waves that reflect off the user’s finger. Fine hand movements, like winding a watch can be recognized at a distance of up to 15 meters away. Just a few decades ago it took a parabolic antenna with a 50 m diameter to do what this chip can do today.
Using Radar Technology has many advantages
- Insensitive to the light
- Can transmit over plastic materials like polycarbonate
- 3D gesture recognition possible
- Recognition of overlapping fingers
- Sub-millimeter resolution with micro-Doppler and time analysis
Google and Infineon plan to address numerous markets with the Soli radar technology. Among these are home entertainment, mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). Radar chips from Infineon as well as Google ATAP's software and interaction concepts form the basis of this technology. Both companies are preparing for the joint commercialization of the Soli technology. Sophisticated haptic algorithms combined with highly integrated and miniaturized radar chips can foster a huge variety of applications.
This 60 GHz radar application developed by Google ATAP and Infineon bridges the gap, as a key technology enabling Augmented Reality.
