
Project Soli – touchless gesture interactions by Google - danr4
https://atap.google.com/soli/
======
neoteo
As always Douglas Adams had some keen, if slightly cynical, insight: "The
machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by
means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became
more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to
brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand
in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of
muscular expenditure of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly
still if you wanted to keep listening to the same programme." Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy.

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guelo
At Google I/O a couple weeks ago they said they had miniaturized the Soli chip
and they demoed a smartwatch with the chip in the wrist band, as well as a
gesture-controlled speaker. They announced the Soli beta dev kit coming "next
year". You can watch starting around 21:40 here
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LO59eN9om4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LO59eN9om4)

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awesomerobot
I'm sure a lot of consumer implementations come to mind pretty quickly for
most, but this could be really huge for accessibility... if you could say,
train gestures tailored to the very specific nuances of a person's available
range of motion. Avoiding the limitations tied to physical hardware would be
huge.

~~~
melling
It could also be huge for ergonomics. Many people develop RSI issues through
repeated keyboard and mouse usage. People have as gone as far as using their
nose as an input device:

[http://www.looknohands.me](http://www.looknohands.me)

There are lots of other RSI stories here:
[https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README.org)

~~~
azinman2
It'll shift to RSI doing these gestures instead. They're still fine motor
control which is what's involved in RSI. Notice how runners don't get RSI in
their legs but pianists do.

Background: I have RSI and have battled it for 15 years now. There's a lot
that's mental and nervous system, and can easily shift in the body (almost
gave myself RSI in my throat and eyes doing voice rec and eye tracking to
avoid typing).

~~~
awesomerobot
Right, but if there's flexibility to change the specific inputs... maybe you
can change motions when/if they're becoming a problem?

Or maybe people should work less?

~~~
azinman2
Anything fine motor, even if the motions are changed, will inevitably cause
problems. The duration doesn't have to be that long -- I could feel the
fatigue in my eyes with eye tracking after just 30-40 minutes. The irony of
course is that my eyes are doing fine motor control all the time, but when you
do it as part of a control-loop then _something_ (neuromuscular?) will cause
you to go into RSI mode and you fatigue quickly. If you don't pause for the
fatigue you can do permanent damage -- which is what happened to my hands on
the most non-ergonomic Apple Newton keyboard.

I use fine motor control for pleasure, not just work.

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dizzydot
It is truly amazing to see the photograph of the huge and complicated
prototype that they managed to put on a chip in under 2 years.

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dskhatri
The radar chip central to Project Soli is developed by Infineon Technologies

[http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/](http://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/promopages/soli/)

[http://www.infineon.com/dgdl/InfineonGoogleSoliFAQEnglish.pd...](http://www.infineon.com/dgdl/InfineonGoogleSoliFAQEnglish.pdf?fileId=5546d46154cc971b0154cf4336930008)

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alex_duf
I may be old school but for every example given in the video, I would rather
have an actual button to press...

~~~
elsewhen
the physical size of buttons/knobs/sliders requires devices to be large enough
to accommodate those elements. with a chip like soli, designers can create
devices that are dramatically smaller.

as the soli gets smaller (which future versions likely will), you can imagine
tiny devices that maintain rich interactivity.

~~~
0x6c6f6c
Exactly. I also prefer physical buttons but imagine what could be done in
terms of reducing space taken by controls alone. This is in many ways vastly
better than touchscreen interfaces since it will allow for many different
kinds of interaction in the same space.

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neves
I want one of these in my glass so my desktop computer would put the focus on
the screen I'm looking.

~~~
kevincox
This can be done today, and probably more accurately with a webcam.

~~~
sourthyme
The video suggests that using radar they can more accurately track hand
motions than using a camera.

~~~
kevincox
It depends what you are tracking. They specifically said that they could more
accurately track depth. For eye motion tracking I suspect that depth isn't a
major component and the 2D image is better to track eye motion, especially
because the pupil has very little change in depth compared to the surrounding
area on the eyeball.

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calebm
Reminds me of the Leap
([https://www.leapmotion.com/](https://www.leapmotion.com/))

~~~
melling
The Leap Motion uses infrared light. It was hugely disappointing at first.
Supposedly it got much better after the Orion SDK release.
[http://blog.leapmotion.com/orion/](http://blog.leapmotion.com/orion/)

Here are a few other ideas gesture devices like the Mylo, FingerIO, and Intel
Real Sense:

[https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README...](https://github.com/melling/ErgonomicNotes/blob/master/README.org#gesture-
computing)

~~~
StavrosK
Why was it hugely disappointing? I've had one since the start and it was
always very accurate, precise and reliable. It had some issues with not being
able to persist in tracking hidden fingers, but it worked really really well
on extended ones.

~~~
codezero
For me it was hugely disappointing because they passed the API off to
individual applications rather than providing some OS level drivers for a
common API so you could drop it in place of other interaction devices. That,
and it used an immense amount of CPU resources on my computers.

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ch4s3
This seems like it could be really interesting for home automation and
accessibility projects.

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Dwolb
How's Google's Biz Dev?

Selling B2B is a whole new ball game for Google (outside of Adwords which is a
special case since it is so valuable to advertisers).

I'd be very wary as a purchaser of this chip on how long Google et. al. have
committed to producing it and their willingness to move up the value chain
(i.e. does Google have a good chance of copying me if I come up with something
valuable?).

The Infineon relationship may help in both cases since they have solid analog
products

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neves
Don't miss the video. They made a great job demonstrating the interactions
with nice visualizations. You can watch it in 1.5x speed with subtitles. Very
cool.

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Touche
This is an incredibly exciting technology!

My first concern is how can these gestures be discovered? Will we just get
used to the same sorts of gestures in different applications over time and
intuit what to do?

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soperj
Watching the gestures reminds me of a theremin.

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Tinyyy
Could this be used to create an “Air Keyboard” that allows you to type by
pretending to type into the air?

~~~
teddyh
Remember the gorilla arm.

[http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/gorilla-
arm.html](http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/gorilla-arm.html)

~~~
eximius
With the size of the chip, its possible to make a wearable on the wrist to
capture the finger input so your arms can face anywhere.

~~~
digi_owl
Hmm, that and AR and you have some interesting potential.

A wrist worn device pr hand that can track individual fingers. Thus freeing up
the hand to still do grasping and such.

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Aelinsaar
This, plus mature augmented reality, minus device's screen... that could start
to get very interesting. Maybe something like a wearable (iWatch or some such)
with this, plus an AR interface creating a 'virtual screen' to interact with.

For my full sized device though, buttons have serious advantages that don't go
away until the motion sensing is hooked up to a REALLY smart computer.

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honkhonkpants
Has anything happened on this since it was announce a year ago?

~~~
melling
Here's this year's demo. Starts at 20:30

[https://youtu.be/8LO59eN9om4?t=20m30s](https://youtu.be/8LO59eN9om4?t=20m30s)

~~~
kruipen
Using a physical button to move slides...

