top of page
Project Soli

Project Soli

 1. Do you like gadgets ? What is your favourite piece of technology ?

 2. Watch the short video, what is project soli ?

 3. What do these words mean ? Use your translator to find out.

Radar

Passion

Embed

Interpret

Precise

Shrink

Transmit

Sense

Finesse

Interaction

Ultimate

Gesture

Archetype

Motivation

 

What is project soli?

 4. Watch and listen to the video clip again and fill in the blanks on a seperate sheet of paper.

My name is Ivan Poupyrev  and I work for advanced technologies and projects  group at Google. The hand is the 1.__________________ input device. It's extremely 2.________________, it's extremely fast and it's very natural for us to use it right. Capturing the possibilities of the human hand was one of my 3.__________________. How could we take this incredible capability, the 4._______________ of human actions and finesse of, of using our hand but apply it to the virtual world? We use radio frequency spectrum which is radars to track human hand. The 5._______________ have been used for many different things, to track cars big objects satellites and planes. We're using them to track micro motions, twitches of the human hand and then use that to interact with wearables and internet things and other computing devices.

 

Our team is focused on taking radar hardware and turning it into a 6.___________ sensor. Radar is a technology which 7.________ a radio wave towards a target and then the receiver of the radar intercepts the reflected energy from that target. The reason why we're able to 8._________ so much from this one radar signal is because of the full gesture recognition pipeline that we've built. The various stages of this pipeline are designed to extract specific gesture information from this one radar signal that we receive at a high frame rate.

From these strange foreign range doppler signals we're actually interpreting human intent.

 

Radar has some unique properties when compared to cameras for example. It has a very high positional acuracy, which means that you can sense the tiniest motions. We arrived at this idea of virtual tools because we recognized that there are certain 9._______________ of controls like a volume knob, or a physical slider, a volume slider. Imagine a button between your thumb and index finger  and the button's not there but pressing this is a very clear action and there's an actual haptic feedback that occurs as you perform that action. The hand can both embody a virtual tool and it can also be, you know acting on that virtual tool at the same time, so if we can recognize that action we have an interesting direction for interacting with technology.

 

So when we started this project you know, me and my team, we looked at the project idea and we thought " are we gonna make it or not? Eh we don't know." But we have to do it because unless you do it, you don't know. What I think I'm most proud about our project is we have pushed the processing power of the electronics itself further out to do the sensing part for us.

 

The radar has properties which no other technology has. It can work through materials, you can 10._____________ it into objects, it allows us to track really precise motions and what is most exciting about it, is that you can 11._____________ the entire radar and put it in a tiny chip. That's what makes this approach so promising. It's extremely reliable, there's nothing to break, there's no moving parts, there's no lenses, there's nothing just a piece of sand on your board.

 

Now we are at a point where we have the hardware where we can 12.___________ these 13.___________________ and we can put them to work. We can explore how well they work and how well they might work in products. It blow's your mind usually when you see things people do and that I'm really looking forward to. I'm really looking forward to releasing this to the development community and I really want them to be excited and 14._________________ to do something cool with it, right?   

 

Project soli
The most accurate finger gesture recognition in the world.
Project soli chip
Why is project soli so accurate?

5. Finally, watch, read and listen to the video clip with subtitles (click CC for English subtitles) this time to see if your answers were correct.

My name is Ivan Poupyrev  and I work for advanced technologies and projects  group at Google. The hand is the ultimate input device. It's extremely precise, it's extremely fast and it's very natural for us to use it right. Capturing the possibilities of the human hand was one of my passions. How could we take this incredible capability, the finesse of human actions and finesse of, of using our hand but apply it to the virtual world? We use radio frequency spectrum which is radars to track human hand. The radars have been used for many different things, to track cars big objects satellites and planes. We're using them to track micro motions, twitches of the human hand and then use that to interact with wearables and internet things and other computing devices.

 

Our team is focused on taking radar hardware and turning it into a gesture sensor. Radar is a technology which transmits a radio wave towards a target and then the receiver of the radar intercepts the reflected energy from that target. The reason why we're able to interpret so much from this one radar signal is because of the full gesture recognition pipeline that we've built. The various stages of this pipeline are designed to extract specific gesture information from this one radar signal that we receive at a high frame rate.

 

From these strange foreign range doppler signals we're actually interpreting human intent. Radar has some unique properties when compared to cameras for example. It has a very high positional acuracy, which means that you can sense the tiniest motions. We arrived at this idea of virtual tools because we recognized that there are certain archetypes of controls like a volume knob, or a physical slider, a volume slider. Imagine a button between your thumb and index finger  and the button's not there but pressing this is a very clear action and there's an actual haptic feedback that occurs as you perform that action. The hand can both embody a virtual tool and it can also be, you know acting on that virtual tool at the same time, so if we can recognize that action we have an interesting direction for interacting with technology.

 

So when we started this project you know, me and my team, we looked at the project idea and we thought " are we gonna make it or not? Eh we don't know." But we have to do it because unless you do it, you don't know. What I think I'm most proud about our project is we have pushed the processing power of the electronics itself further out to do the sensing part for us.

 

The radar has properties which no other technology has. It can work through materials, you can embed it into objects, it allows us to track really precise motions and what is most exciting about it, is that you can shrink the entire radar and put it in a tiny chip. That's what makes this approach so promising. It's extremely reliable, there's nothing to break, there's no moving parts, there's no lenses, there's nothing just a piece of sand on your board.

 

Now we are at a point where we have the hardware where we can sense these interactions and we can put them to work. We can explore how well they work and how well they might work in products. It blow's your mind usually when you see things people do and that I'm really looking forward to. I'm really looking forward to releasing this to the development community and I really want them to be excited and motivated to do something cool with it, right?   

What does the project soli microchip look like?
Project soli design
Project soli finger gesture recognition practically 100% accurate.
Project soli finger recognition

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."

                                                                              B. F. Skinner

 

"Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important."

                                                                               Bill Gates

 

bottom of page