Interfaces  

Google's Project Soli is a new interaction technology that uses radar sensors that can accurately track sub-millimeter motions at high speed. It fits onto a chip, can be produced at scale and built into small devices and everyday objects.

Google’s Project Soli could make touching your Gorilla Glass wrapped device seem like using a rotary dial telephone does to us today. With the ability to track minute hand and and finger movements, all in a tiny sensor, Soli seems ideal for interacting with the plethora of ever-smaller devices and screens.

"The hand can both embody a virtual tool, and it can also be acting on that virtual tool at the same time."

Based on the video below, from Google Advanced Technologies Products (ATAP) group, the technology could be even more accurate and minutely precise than Leap Motion's system.

"The hand can both embody a virtual tool, and it can also be acting on that virtual tool at the same time," says Project Soli Design Lead, Carsten Schwesig.

Soli allows users to control devices using natural hand motions, including incredibly fine motions accurately and precisely.  Because it is a radar device, the sensor can even work through materials like a table or cloth.

Haptic feedback is also part of the interaction, with your hand naturally touching itself. Soli uses your hand as its own user interface for gesture like turning a knob, or scrolling between your thumb and forefinger on an invisible, virtual device.

"Radar gas some unique properties when compared to cameras for example," says Emre Karagozler, a hardware engineer with Project Soli. "It has very high positional accuracy, which means that you can sense the tiniest motions."

Soli may be ideal for small devices, like smartwatches and other wearables, especially since it works through surfaces and at a distance.

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A key development of making Soli was the push to make the hardware smaller and faster

The tiny interaction sensor runs at 60GHz and can capture motions of your fingers at resolutions and speeds that haven’t been possible before—up to 10,000 frames per second. To get there, the team had to reinterpret traditional radar, which bounces a signal from an object and provides a single return ping.

To capture the complexity of hand movements at close range, Soli illuminates the whole hand with a broad radar beam, and estimates the hand configuration by analyzing changes in the returned signal over time.

Soli is being targeted for broad availability soon, in a form factor suitable for incorporation into wearable devices like smartwatches. By the end of this year your next smartphone could have this new interface technology.




SOURCE  TechCrunch

By 33rd Square

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 Computer Interfaces  

Leap Motion’s motion-tracking software just got much better. The company has released Version 2 of their software to developers in a public beta. The update allows developers to create applications that can make use of very subtle finger and joint movements.

Motion tracker maker Leap Motion has released their free Version 2 software to developers in a public beta. The update is available to developers now, and does not require any new hardware to implement.

The company wants developers to be the first to work with V2 before the new version receives its consumer release.

"V2 tracking is a critical step forward on this path: it makes it much easier for developers to build transformative applications that are consistent with this vision."

According to the Leap Motion blog, this is the first of several major updates to come before the consumer release. The significance of the update is that the new version will make it possible for developers to leverage more intricate tracking capabilities, for building greater content.

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According to the post, V2 retains the speed and positional accuracy found in V1, but the software also now tracks the actual joints and bones inside each of the user’s fingers. This leads to some immediate benefits over V1:

• -Finger and hand labels – every finger, hand, and joint now has anatomical labels like ‘pinky’, ‘left hand’, and ‘proximal phalanges’
• -Occlusion robustness – fingers are tracked even when they’re not seen by the controller, as might happen if you turned your hands completely vertically or intertwined the fingers of your left and right hands
• -Massively improved resistance to ambient infrared light – sunlight, powerful halogens, etc.
• -Much more granular data for developers about the user’s hands and fingers – 27 dimensions per hand, in addition to special parameters like grab/pinch APIs

Leap Motion claims the new version will allow users to reach into the screen and interact with applications in the same way we interact with the physical world every day.

This means taking things like sculpting a lump of clay, snapping together building blocks, or learning to play an instrument – the types of actions 99% of people just won’t or can’t do on a computer with traditional input devices like a mouse and keyboard. For instance, Elon Musk and his team at SpaceX have used Leap Motion to build a Tony Stark-inspired CAD interface. They system potentially allows instantly accessibility to anyone who knows how to interact with interfaces that mimic interactions they use with their hands in the real world.

Of course, this was the promise of the Leap Motion system when it was first introduced.  The new update looks to overcome some of the glitches and bugs that the initial release did not fully account for. With this beta release to developers, the company hopes to release a consumer version that really works as promised.



SOURCE  Leap Motion

By 33rd Square

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 Virtual Reality  

From Sensorama in the 1950's to today's Oculus Rift, virtual reality has long been the technology with a lot of promise, but little delivery.  That trend is changing though, as more and more practical applications are being found and the hardware is catching up to our perception.

Virtual reality has come a long way from its humble beginnings in the 1950s. These days, it's becoming closer to being an everyday reality, with popular technology such as the Oculus Rift, and organizations large and small figuring out exactly what the practical applications of virtual reality are for their industry.

The Washington Post reports the Centers for Disease Control is gearing up to use virtual reality as a way to accustom its workers on how to deal with actual crisis situations they'll be heading into. It gives an immersive type of training that could only be duplicated by sending trainees to the environments they're going to be working in. While you might not run into helmet-wearing individuals around every corner yet, the advance of virtual reality technology is making a sci-fi future become closer to present-day reality. Now if only they could get flying cars on the mark already.

The Beginnings

In the '50s, cinematographer Morton Heilig wanted to create a technology that helped movie storytelling by engaging every sense. It wasn't until 1957, that he had a physical representation of his idea called the Sensorama. It was not the most elegant-looking machine, as it was composed of a stereoscopic display for the visual, and stimulated the rest of the senses with fans, odor devices, speakers and a chair that simulated movement.

Photo by Flickr user mikecogh

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Eventually, he also created a 3D head-mounted television. Virtual reality didn't start to become popular until 1984, when Michael McGreevy started looking into virtual reality technology to create human computer interfaces. None of this technology was actually referred to as virtual reality until a few years later.

Modern Day

Virtual reality still isn't a particular pervasive technology in the modern day, but a few recent advances are set to change the public opinion and increase the amount of practical usage throughout many industries. The Oculus Rift, one of the most well-known pieces of virtual reality technology these days, is a head-mounted display geared at the video game industry. Currently only available as a $300 dev kit, this virtual reality machine has received a lot of developer attention. Just imagine playing "Battlefield 4" or another first-person shooter in a completely immersive fashion. There are some major issues with the machine, such as motion sickness, that the company is currently fixing.

Photo of Oculus Rift by Sergey Galyonkin via Wikimedia Commons

Another company takes on a slightly different visual tactic than the Oculus Rift. Avegant displays the graphics directly to your retinas, by what's known as virtual retinal display (VRD), making it a more immersive form of technology.

Practical Applications

The Oculus Rift is a great piece of technology and proof of concept, but the real question is exactly how companies will use virtual reality technology in practical applications. The educational world can make use of virtual reality for immersive teaching lessons, allowing students to experience ancient cultures, get up close and personal with dangerous animals, and fly through space for a bird's-eye view of the stars. The military also has many areas they can use virtual reality in, such as combat field training without the risk of throwing unseasoned soldiers directly onto the battlefield.

By Bobby Rotterdam

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Author Bio - Bobby builds custom gaming PCs during the day and plays his own at night. He loves writing about the latest gaming hardware.

 Computer Interfaces

A start-up company, Leap Motion have built a device about the size of a cigarette lighter that contains three tiny cameras inside. It attaches to a computer and turns any PC or Mac into a gesture-recognition device. The idea is similar to the one behind Microsoft’s Kinect, the device that lets people play games just by moving their hands and body.

Where Microsoft's Kinect brought the idea of 3D motion tracking to mainstream adoption in the marketplace, the 3D camera's low, 640x480 resolution, moderate input lag, and bulky form factor have somewhat limited its use cases.

Now, a new startup called Leap Motion wants to revolutionize the motion-tracking space with a chewing-gum-pack-sized 3D sensor that promises sub-millimeter accuracy.

Leap Motion claims its small sensor creates a "three-dimensional interaction space" of four cubic meters that can track the 3D position and orientation of individual fingers and even thin objects like pencils in real time, all to a tolerance of one-hundredth of a millimeter.

The company says the breakthrough in resolution comes not from the hardware, which consists of relatively standard parts, but from what CTO David Holz calls "a number of major algorithmic and mathematical problems that had not been solved or were considered unsolvable."


In the video demo below prepared for Cult of Mac, Holz demonstrates what appear to be very responsive and accurate gestures with his finger tips and hands.  Some may argue that as for replacing the mouse, the Leap Motion interface might not be comfortable over long stretches, however with the kind of performance exhibited in the video, the device is intriguing.  Moreover, the Kinect has been very successful for Microsoft and is being extended into a number of uses, including robotics.  If Leap Motion can do the same via its developer program, it may be an ideal device for robotic sensing and much more.

The San Francisco-based company has just started taking preorders for the $69.99 PC- and Mac-compatible device, which it plans to ship in December. It's unclear exactly what apps the system will support at that time, but the company told CNET it has plans to offer up 15,000 to 20,000 free development kits to kick-start the software market on its open platform.






SOURCE  Core 77

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