Google & Infineon advance gesture control partnership

Ivan Poupyrev, Technical Project Lead, Google ATAP, commented: “Gesture sensing offers a new opportunity to revolutionise the human-machine interface by enabling mobile and fixed devices with a third dimension of interaction. This will fill the existing gap with a convenient alternative for touch- and voice controlled interaction.”

"Since mankind started using tools 2.4m years ago, this is the first time in history that tools adapt to their users, rather than the other way round,” said Andreas Urschitz, President, Power Management & Multimarket division, Infineon.

Market opportunity

Infineon and Google ATAP aim at addressing numerous markets with 'Soli' radar technology. Among these are home entertainment, mobile devices and the IoT. Radar chips from Infineon as well as Google ATAP’s software and interaction concepts form the basis. Both companies are preparing for the joint commercialisation of the 'Soli' technology.

“Sophisticated haptic algorithms combined with highly integrated and miniaturised radar chips can foster a huge variety of applications,” added Urschitz.

In addition of their efforts in the audio and smartwatch markets, the developers’ ambitions are more comprehensive: “It is our target to create a new market standard with compelling performance and new user experience, creating a core technology for enablement of augmented reality and IoT,” said Urschitz. While VR technologies could already visualise new realities in the past, users could not interact with these. The 60GHz radar application developed by Google and Infineon bridges the gap, as a key technology enabling augmented reality.