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posted by martyb on Monday May 20 2019, @09:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the watch-it! dept.

IEEE Spectrum:

Tired of trying to tap icons on small smartwatch screens? Some day you could just swipe right through the air above them thanks to miniaturized radar technology and its accompanying gesture recognition technology in development at imec, the Belgium-based R&D center.

Imec's radar chips operate at around 145 GHz, well above the bands used for car radar. That high up in the electromagnetic spectrum, the chip can take advantage of a full 10 gigahertz of bandwidth, which leads to millimeter-scale resolution, its inventors say.

"Gestures allow a lot of capabilities where screens are becoming too small for fine movements," says Kathleen Philips, program director for IoT at imec. "Radar is great for measuring movement; this particular radar is great for measuring micromovements."

If they combine this technology with a wand that must be swept in precise patterns, they will be richer than God.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @11:04PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 20 2019, @11:04PM (#845665)
    No matter. It's useless because human hands are not precise enough, especially at the wrist. Nobody is going to wear this thing, and there won't be receivers for its signals. At best this could be rebuilt into a scanning radar for the blind.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Tuesday May 21 2019, @12:57AM

    by bob_super (1357) on Tuesday May 21 2019, @12:57AM (#845685)

    Amputees, degenerative diseases, quadraplegics ... there's a decent number of applications for fine motion tracking, which seem useless/cumbersome/tiring to the people with ten fingers.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Tuesday May 21 2019, @01:27PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday May 21 2019, @01:27PM (#845788) Journal

    Amputate both arms. Replace with robot arms. Embed smartwatch into robot arm with big battery.

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