Every year at I/O, Google’s ATAP division, which is responsible for turning some of the company’s craziest ideas into products came with some new projects. This year it came with many projects including the Project Soli which we will talk about in this article
A tiny radar system into a Smartwatch for gesture controls?
Google manage to build a tiny radar system into a smartwatch for gesture controls recently. The concept was turning a whole radar into a very small chip which they could integrate in small devices like the Smartwatch which is becoming popular nowadays. they attempt to build a very small radar sensor that can translate hand and fingers movements into digital signals to give users a new whole experience with theirs devices. But the main question is why we need such technology in our Smartwatches or any other devices?.
Ivan Poupyrev disagree with us and said that the question above isn’t the right question to ask but the right question is “How are you going to interact with an invisible computer?”. Well, he was right about that question. Because this technology is actually meant to answer that. Imagine you control you computer or smartphone or smartwatch only by moving your hands or fingers.
Google start this project which called Project Soli to turn a radar to a tiny radar and put it into smaller devices not just to be controlled by hands or fingers actually but also to make it work with the eyes. Soli Project will help people to be ready for a future where computers are everything, “We’re coming back to this humanity, where the digital becomes part of the real,” Poupyrev says.
Until this moment, this seems to be some sort of fantasy or science fiction but after you see the video below you will be 100% sure that Google was able to make such technology .
A tiny radar system into a Smartwatch for gesture controls : hands, fingers and eyes
Of course many website such as the verge, mention that this project isn’t complete and the controls are not 100% working as they should work. But we should keep in mind that this is only a prototype and we can’t judge a product just after trying the prototype. For example if we compare the prototype of last year which was not useful because It used too much power and while the sensor was small, it did need a fully powered desktop or laptop to run it. But this year the same team succeed to redesign the chip with Infineon which can reduce power consumption 22 times down from 1.2 to 0.054 W now and make the footprint 3x smaller.As you may know Radar typically takes a lot of computational power, but with this new version they manage to make it 256x more efficient and run at 18,000 fps (frames per second).
ATAP is going to launch a new beta-quality dev kit for developers next year, but sadly, we don’t know when we will see the first product of the Project Soli in stores.Tech World is growing fast and we will sure see something more amazing next year.
I think this project will be more useful when it used in holographic computer in the future. What do you think about this technology? and building a tiny radar system into a Smartwatch for gestures controls is it useful for you?