Google ATAP
1 HN recommender · recommended in 14 months, 2015–2019
3:57 · 5.6M views · May 29, 2015
Google ATAP's 2015 introduction to Project Soli, a radar-based sensor on a chip that tracks sub-millimeter hand motions for gesture interaction in small devices.
Referenced for years as the go-to example of fine gesture input, often in discussions of keyboard replacements and later its appearance in the Pixel 4.
20 comments from Hacker News
Google finally ships a research project in a real product and people don’t seem to understand the usefulness. Human nature for some reason often devolves to “what’s the point?” Here’s the 2015 announcement. There’s a lot of potential. Maybe we’d all benefit from “imagine what’s now possible “ this video
Hand Gesture controls bother me. I see all these fancy implementations enabling hand gestures such as the Google ATAP project called Soli [1], but none of these replace haptical feedback. One of the major aspects of any haptical human-to-machine interface is feedback and robustness. When you turn a high quality 30 indent encoder from Alps [2] or avionics grade Elma encoder [3]; you'll realize the value of haptic feedback. There is a reason why cockpits are full of knobs and dials, although unfortunately, that's changing due to highly integrated multi-function glass instruments. Problem with hand gestures is robustness. Theramins (hand gesture based music instrument) are cool, but they take forever to master and I am not saying they are trying to replace pianos, but let's just say - iPad pianos are not fun precisely because of the lack of feedback. I really think gesture based controls are inferior. They have no place in my living room, my car or anywhere in my life. That said, I think the implementation of hand gesture based systems as pointed out in this article are truly interesting. It is a challenging problem. [1] this video [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
The radar chip is especially interesting. I remember being intrigued when it was presented by the ATAP team years ago: this video The team showed an impressive amount of cool stuff back then, it's nice to see one of these projects shipping on a flagship product. There's more info here on how it's used: [LINK] EDIT: found the original presentation: [LINK] . I think the touch sensitive cloth project also made it into a few products.
How old are you? It’s really not that hard to imagine the keyboard being replaced by one, or a combination, of technologies in the next decade or two. Voice has gotten dramatically better in the past few years. Another decade? There are also gesture technologies: this video Anyway, if you’ve got 3 or 4 decades of life, you still think we won’t have sufficient advances to replace the keyboard?
Paper notebooks might be. [LINK] The cell phone, etc will be a much bigger extension. However, we still need better ways to input, organize and access the information. Handwritten notes, voice memos, pictures, drawings, unstructured and structured data, etc. Cortana/Siri with hand tracking ( this video ) and a HoloLens will allow people to organize everything in creative ways.