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Elliptic Labs releases ultrasound gesturing SDK for Android, will soon integrate into smartphones
Elliptic Labs has already spruced up a number of tablets by adding the ability to gesture instead of make contact with a touchpanel, and starting this week, it'll bring a similar source of wizardry to Android. The 20-member team is demoing a prototype here at CEATEC in Japan, showcasing the benefits of its ultrasound gesturing technology over the conventional camera-based magic that already ships in smartphones far and wide. In a nutshell, you need one or two inexpensive (under $1 a pop) chips from Murata baked into the phone; from there, Elliptic Labs' software handles the rest. It allows users to gesture in various directions with multiple hands without having to keep their hands in front of the camera... or atop the phone at all, actually. (To be clear, that box around the phone is only there for the demo; consumer-friendly versions will have the hardware bolted right onto the PCB within.) The goal here is to make it easy for consumers to flip through slideshows and craft a new high score in Fruit Ninja without having to grease up their display. Company representatives told us that existing prototypes were already operating at sub-100ms latency, and for a bit of perspective, most touchscreens can only claim ~120ms response times. It's hoping to get its tech integrated into future phones from the major Android players (you can bet that Samsung, LG, HTC and the whole lot have at least heard the pitch), and while it won't ever be added to existing phones, devs with games that could benefit from a newfangled kind of gesturing can look for an Android SDK to land in the very near future. Mat Smith contributed to this report.
Inventor crafts inexpensive gesture-based 3D touchpad
While there's been boasting galore about gesture-based keyboards, scanners, phones, and more keyboards, it looks like an elusive inventor has crafted yet another "3D touchpad" which can be moved around and placed on (or under) nearly any keyboard that you'd like to implement gesture-based technology on. As with similar renditions, the pad can detect movements of your hand floating above it, and can create inputs not always possible on a typical keyboard. Interestingly, this flavor can purportedly work on standard boards, underneath laptop boards, and even under the "screen of a PDA or cellphone." While our skeptic gear is still zipped on tight, it's said that a few working examples are already out of the lab, and that the special antennas capable of picking up hand movements wouldn't cost much more than it did to insert "scroll wheels into mice." We'll let the peculiar analogy slide if this thing hits the market for a competitive price, deal?[Thanks, Kerunt]
