The idea of touching a screen and directly interacting with content has been with us for some time now. Several companies are currently working on alternate or better ways for us to interact with our smart devices. At CES 2015 we sat down with Guenael Strutt, VP Product Development at Elliptic Labs, who showed us the company's ultrasonic touchless gesturing technology.
This touchless technique requires a minimum of three microphones and one transducer to detect the motion of a hand and its distance from the screen. The demo unit in the video uses four microphones, located in each front corner, and two transducers, located above and below the screen, to improve gesture recognition and precision.
The signals from the sensors are fed to a DSP (Digital Signal Processor) in the onboard SoC, which interprets the data without the need for any additional chips. Elliptic Labs provides the DSP driver and gesture software for OEMs to integrate, along with an SDK for developers.
Elliptic Labs, a privately held company, was founded in 2006 as a spinoff from the University of Oslo. The company, which now has offices in Palo Alto, California, and Oslo, Norway, is currently working with OEMs to integrate its technology into smartphones and tablets and hopes to see a product released in the next six to nine months.
Matt Humrick is a Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware, covering Smartphones and Tablets. Contact him at mhumrick@tomshardware.com and follow him on Twitter @digitalOut_net. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
