> A loud clatter of gunk music flooded through the Heart of Gold cabin as Zaphod searched the sub-etha radio wave bands for news of himself. The machine was rather difficult to operate. For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
> Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.
Censorship isn't really a product. Also a website censoring itself vs an ISP censoring a website can be thought of as different actions. A website developing a hand sensor vs an ISP developing a hand sensor seem essentially the same. (Censor vs sensor pun not intended.)
Having spent a fair bit of time looking into applications for gesture inputs (kinect and leap motion mostly) I can tell you the hardest part by far will the user experience design. Gestures are extremely unintuitive on their own. Users need really clear prompts and/or training to understand how to use them. And if you want to innovate and create new and subtle gestures as your product evolves, it only gets worse.
The leap motion is already pretty good and has some useful applications, but it's still very, very niche. The Soli looks like a real evolution of the technology in terms of both precision and how embeddable it is, but it's going to have the same challenges in user adoption. I'd expect this kind of thing to get more traction in industry than in people's homes.
I've worked in this space for educational software. You hit the nail on the head. Detecting what people do with their hands is easy. Building a UX out of that is hard.
I figure the only reliable way to extract gesture intents is to define them abstractly (as a set of drawings or what have you), have a large number of people try to execute them, and then design/learn the detector based on that.
Go big or go home. That's one thing I like about Google/Alphabet. Not being afraid to try completely new things outside the normal comfort zone of their traditional product space, and aiming for the most radical potentially game changing ones at that.
I'm glad that Sergey and Larry have been able to stay at the helm, keeping Google/Alphabet from devolving into just another short term quarterly earnings chasing company and continuing to set up institutions in place that will ensure the culture of innovation which has made the company so successful lasts long into the future.
Go big, let your product stagnate for a couple of years coz it doesn't improve adsense dollar revenue in a direct way and then go home.
reminder that inbox is getting the shotgun to the head this year while gmail still feels like it's stuck in the early 2010s and that's just the most recent one.
any area that google dominates in nowadays feels almost accidental, like they don't actually want to dominate that area but the alternatives don't have their datacentres and thus aren't as good-for eg youtube.
Popular wisdom is that google culture rewards too much the creation of new projects, but not as much their maintenance
- which looks comparatively worse in a CV or when being considered for raises. Since they also hire mostly high-achievers, the result is that everyone wants to move into new things and "old" products are soon left to wither.
I'd be curious to know the opinion of actual Googlers about this common theory.
I've yet to see a single explanation why Google is supposed to maintain a non-profitable project/product indefinetly.
If Inbox (or other projects commonly coming up on these whines) would be a startup, it would end up on https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ a long time ago. Why would Google keep maintaining and burning money on an unsuccessful free (!) product? Isn't "fail fast" the main praised mentality of startups here?
I wouldn’t expect anyone to maintain something unprofitable indefinitely, but Google’s reputation is to offer something free long enough to destroy any existing market and then kill it when there’s no one left to fill the void. It’d generally be better if they never offered it at all.
A lot of these projects Google has killed were very obviously going to be non-profitable from the start because they had no business model.
Take Allo or Wave for example, how was a messaging app with no ads supposed to make any money even if it was successful? So why did they even bother in the first place if they're going to kill non-profitable projects?
What exactly is stagnating in your opinion? The Google Ads platform is currently one of the primary means of generating steady income for funding research and development efforts into new future technology, innovation, and growth.
I personally believe focusing so much on advertising is a short term narrow minded way of judging Google/Alphabet as the company is pretty much a fully fledged conglomerate at this point. Even so, the growth of advertising revenue has consistently increased 20-30% for almost 15 years now. Considering it's sheer size, that's definitive and definite success regardless of your qualms with how Google culture encourages employees to try new things even if they might fail. In fact, though it may seem random, it is exactly because Google/Alphabet is so willing to try and do new things that it can succeed in so many immensely different industries and markets from molten salt energy storage all the way to pest control using genetically modified mosquitoes.
All of google's email software offerings, all their chat software offerings, their AR platform offerings, their VR platform offerings, does Android things even exist anymore beyond a toy development kit?
i don't even bother with google products anymore unless i see 2 years of concrete support & development. google product early adoption does not pay off
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said in an order late on Monday that it would grant Google a waiver to operate the Soli sensors at higher power levels than currently allowed.
One area in which I think this could be big: deaf culture.
Instead of a device being triggered by voice, you can trigger commands by spelling them out via ASL and hoping NL can predict wisely or give choices -> wait for users response signal.
> Facebook Inc (FB.O) raised concerns with the FCC that the Soli sensors operating in the spectrum band at higher power levels might have issues coexisting with other technologies.
Why did Facebook have a say in this? Are they building one too?
It's roughly the same in the US. Typically when changes are made to a government accepted standard/radio frequency rules all of the currently participating organizations are given a chance to review/debate changes.
Google already has a pretty good idea of what you are doing at all times using the sensors in your phone... this will give them even more information about you... I hope at least that this new tech won't be able to read you from the next room (through walls).
Imagine this in a bracelet form factor that puts multiple sensors in a loop around your forearm which it uses to locate and sense the position of the opposite hand.
VR/AR use cases suffer from poor input controls; this might be a better approach.
So with this technology will Google be able to scan anything in the room, including the gestures? If this technology is used the same way microphones are used in IOT devices like Alexa I have some concerns.
I have this this exact technology documented from 2014, except my idea uses RFID. Could literally make anything touch-enabled, included existing touchless monitors.
So I just looked up the prices on Mouser and Digikey for an amplifier or mixer in those frequencies, and boy are they expensive. The R&D spend must be enormous for them not to be making those parts in these frequencies as separate bits.
I mean, you can make a RADAR with a single transistor, 2 diodes, an exotic but off the shelf VCO, and clever transmission lines. I doubt the R&D cost is very high for for the MMIC here.
Detecting some motion with a sensor and detecting precise motion using radar is very different. It’s a novel use of technology, and I’m for one perfectly happy with this kind of invention being patentable.
Do you understand that the difference there is not much bigger than detecting motion gesture, and detecting notion gesture and claiming doing that precisely?
Both things require mm waveradar and some non-trivial DSP functionality to recognise gesture from clutter, and both have to be calibrated to significant precision.
This is the that glaring flaw of current patent system where there can be 20 very similar products, but all covered by different patents with only difference being verbage on the patent.
> Zaphod waved a hand and the channel switched again.
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1329