Google’s big keynote yesterday had plenty of interesting stuff for the Android lovers among us, but some really exciting advances in technology were shown off today by Google’s head of advanced technologies and projects division, Regina Dugan. Dugan introduced one new technology development as Project Soli, a gesture radar solution that Dugan and her team have been developing since last June.
Dugan started the presentation by setting up an everyday use case–that smart devices currently don’t have a reliable way to interface with them since they’re considerably smaller than our phones. Project Soli is designed to fix that problem entirely, as it’s a gesture-based radar solution. Interacting with small interfaces using radar was previously impossible, as radar dishes are much too large to fit into a smart device interface.
ATAP created its very own mobile gesture radar system that’s small enough to fit inside of a smartwatch. Check out the demonstration above and you can see Ivan Poupyrev, the ATAP Technical Project lead give a short demonstration of how the technology works. You can hover your hand over the watch to interact with its software, play games, or even just adjust the time. You no longer need to tap on your watch, or curse after you’ve mis-tapped twice in a row because the screen is so small.
According to Proupyrev, the APIs for Project Soli will be available later this year, which could mean the next generation of smartwatches could include wearable gestures that take the complication out of building a UI that needs to be compact but also responsive to touch.
