Small radar ICs will be useful for other things.<p>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.<p>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.<p>(Presentations from computers still look lame. The audience usually sees the presenter's desktop while they futz with the computer, then enter PowerPoint.)
I though the auto industry was commoditizing this technology with minature and cheap technology.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhrLetrTSYA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhrLetrTSYA</a>
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.<p>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.
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).
They've had "small" radar modules for a while, commonly used as microwave movement detectors[0] Also, here is the manufacturer brochure[1]<p>[0] <a href="http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/2013/08/21/breakout-board-uses-hb100-doppler-motion-sensor/" rel="nofollow">http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/2013/08/21/breakout-boar...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.agilsense.com/useruploads/files/01_HB%20selection%20list%20ver300.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.agilsense.com/useruploads/files/01_HB%20selection...</a>
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.
so they are using something like 60-66GHz which beside small antenna size advantage makes for the fastest attenuation <a href="http://www.propagation.gatech.edu/ECE6390/project/Fall2012/Team09/Team9GeoSatTech_website_FINAL/SatCom%20website/images/GaseousAttenuation.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.propagation.gatech.edu/ECE6390/project/Fall2012/T...</a> . Pretty logical.
I want to combine one of these chips with a magic mirror.<p>If this works, then it is one of Google's greatest projects, the number of applications are huge.