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Welcome to Project Soli

Google ATAP · 5.6M views · 2015-05-29 · 3:57

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Recommended by 1 HN people across 1 months · HN mentions 2015–2019

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What people said

melling · 2019-10 · Recommendation

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 “ [VIDEO]

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cbolton · 2019-10 · Reference

The radar chip is especially interesting. I remember being intrigued when it was presented by the ATAP team years ago: [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.

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fermienrico · 2018-01 · Criticism

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] [VIDEO] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Google ATAP, played through YouTube.

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