At Google’s annual developer conference held in San Francisco, they showed a new type of haptic interface chip incorporating a 60 GHz radar providing sufficient resolution to allow the interpretation of subtle finger movements and gestures. The chip generates a radar signal to illuminate the target and the returned Doppler signals are received and fed into a gesture recognition pipeline. Various stages in the pipeline are designed to extract specific gestures in the return signal pattern using a high frame rate.

The Soli system has been developed by Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) research team and targeted for use in wearables and IoT devices. The complete radar system is fully integrated into a single chip, requiring no moving parts or any sort of lens, making the system very reliable compared with the traditional mechanical analogs.

A virtual watchface was used to demonstrate that the software can also use distance information as well as gestures; making a watch-winding twiddle with the fingers in front of the sensor changed the hour setting then moving the hand away and performing the same movement changed the minutes setting. The Soli system is in an advanced stage of development but no date for release is available. If you cant wait for this to hit the market check out the Microchip Hillstar 3D gesture system Dev Kit we have been working with. Watch our unboxing & walkthrough video