Google gestures at 60GHz

Google showed at its annual developer conference a 60GHz device that acts as a radar-on-chip for controlling small-screen devices using gestures. The technology isn’t yet authorized by the FCC, but Google’s ATAP research team believes its Soli will find use in wearables.

“We propose to use the vocabulary of hand motions for [device] interactions, creating a generic input device that eliminates the need to interact with a smartphone,” said project lead Ivan Poupyrev in a talk at Google I/O. “It doesn’t have to be a virtual touch pad...your hand can become a variety of controls—a virtual dial, a slider,” he said.

The team has developed two Soli chips, a 9mm² device using pulse radar and an 11mm² chip using continuous signal radar. Both run at 60GHz with sub-millimeter accuracy. Soli's radar can illuminate a hand with a broad beam, then treat the received signal as a complex superposition that takes note of your hand as it moves.

"From the signal representations, we can extract features that directly measure my hands characteristics and dynamics,” said Jaime Lien, lead research engineer for Soli. “These features are fed into machine learning algorithms, which interpret them into gesture labels, and now the sensor can tell if I’m wiggling figures or not,” she said.

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