Radar gives you range rate directly. Getting range rate from vision is hard and takes several frame times at least. If you have position and range rate and dump it into a machine learning system, gesture recognition should be straightforward.
It's not clear how useful this will be for GUIs in general. It could be useful for interacting with large screen displays, where you may be too far back for touch and a mouse is a pain. A presentation version could be useful.
(Presentations from computers still look lame. The audience usually sees the presenter's desktop while they futz with the computer, then enter PowerPoint.)
> Presentations from computers still look lame. The audience usually sees the presenter's desktop while they futz with the computer, then enter PowerPoint.
1. Unplug VGA/HDMI cable
2. Do all of the futzing
3. Plug VGA/HDMI cable
This is a solved technical problem. That people can't be bothered is the real problem.
Except half of the time your OS does weird-ass things in step 3, displays the wrong part of the screen, wrong resolution, crashes the app, etc. It's better now than it used to be, but then again a lot of presenters don't use bleeding-edge hardware with most recent & fully updated OS.
I think PowerPoint already does this; Keynote's had it for ages, and I've done it on Linux with Beamer a few years back. You have presenter's notes with a small slide preview on the screen in front of you, actual slides on the big screen.
These days I run my presentations in reveal.js (HTML5), so the output is trivially cross-platform and videos, 3D content etc. always work flawlessly. This also has speaker notes, implemented as two browser windows (one for each screen) with linked controls.
Any presentation tool worth using has a presenter mode where on your primary display you see things like the current slide, your notes, a timer, the upcoming slide, etc.
I though the auto industry was commoditizing this technology with minature and cheap technology.
This also happened with air bag accelerometers which sell for dimes now. They were first used to detect falling laptops and retract rotating disk arms to save disks. Then you put two or three in mobile devices figure out the 3D orientation of screens.
In my opinion this is awful for those of us who have to help people do things from time to time. Yet another UI that is impossible to walk somebody through over the phone.
If this is available with a few meters of range, it has potential for automatic door control. Star Trek quality door control has been done experimentally [1] but the standard sensors are too dumb. You want range, azimuth and range rate. This is no big deal in a radar; it just costs too much.
If someone is moving fast, the door opens sooner, and faster. Moving parallel to the door should not trigger it. (In Japan, automatic sliding doors on street storefronts are common, and false triggers from passers-by are a problem.) With good sensors on both sides, you can open the door further in advance if there's someone on the other side. This allows opaque automatic doors.
This is really exciting. It's sort of clear that there is no one killer interface, but truly robust gesture recognition, DL driven natural language interfaces, and speech recognition start to describe a nice landscape for VR and AR.
When I'm trying to create a lot of text, I'll still use a keyboard, but most of the time that's not what I want to be doing.
Yeah, most developers say they'll stick with a keyboard.
I'm still holding out for the clever person who integrates gestures into a keyboard killer. You can use gestures chords, for example. With intellisense and other intelligent completion, the future might not need a keyboard.
How cool would it be to have a keyboard where you can hold down a "gesture button" or just move your hands/fingers over a certain zone and have it pick up small gestures? You'd barely need to move your hands and could probably keep your wrists in the same position.
This could then do things like more natural scrolling, cursor control, obviously more complex actions.
They keyboard is great for what it does, but improving input doesn't necessarily have to mean getting rid of something that works quite well and completely reimagining it.
I don't think automatic completion is ever going to be a good substitute for solid text input. If your text input solution always requires it, I for one am not buying. That said, I'm hopeful for a gesture-based text input system that doesn't require any crutches.
I wish there was more technical detail. I would love to know the performance characteristics of the radar, and what techniques it uses (eg. is it fully coherent, waveform repetition frequency, etc).
Precisely. You need synthetic aperture (or similarly complicated Fourier analysis) with multiple transceive pathways to get a good 3D model of the environment.
It's very impressive that this project managed to miniaturize both the radio hardware and the computational hardware required for this. You need to perform FFTs very fast to make this work.
Many alarm systems have gunn-diode microwave motion sensors in them. Replace this with high-resolution radar and networking for house-wide whole-body gesture recognition.
Another great tool for touch-less interfaces. I think the odd aspect of this Google I/O demonstration is the novelty usage of the technology for a smart watch. This tech seems like it is more difficult than it's worth in that form factor, but for devices that must remain sanitary, say in a kitchen, or a medical device in an OR, I like the potential.
Radar gives you range rate directly. Getting range rate from vision is hard and takes several frame times at least. If you have position and range rate and dump it into a machine learning system, gesture recognition should be straightforward.
It's not clear how useful this will be for GUIs in general. It could be useful for interacting with large screen displays, where you may be too far back for touch and a mouse is a pain. A presentation version could be useful.
(Presentations from computers still look lame. The audience usually sees the presenter's desktop while they futz with the computer, then enter PowerPoint.)