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We are very excited about the gesture recognizer. It combines technology developed at UC Berkeley
at the Sensor and Actuator Center and at the Swarm Laboratory. By focusing on the power
and size constraints of mobile devices, we've created a new and natural way for interacting
with electronics. For a long time, people have used light to detect objects, like the
way a camera works, but using light and cameras to detect objects in 3D requires a lot of
power and computation. Now, inspired by medical ultrasound, we've made micromachined ultrasonic
transducers that operate in air. The best part is that the sensor is really small and
really low-power. Whereas a camera takes one Watt to record video, our sensor takes 400
microwatts to do 3D range finding. That's low enough power to run the system for 30
hours on a battery this small. It's so small, you might not even be able to see it. We built
a prototype unit that demonstrates this technology. This is the ultrasound chip, and this is the
custom chip that sends and receives electrical signals from the ultrasound chip. We use an
array of tiny ultrasound transducers to send a pulse of sound waves into the environment.
We drive the sensor, and it moves up and down, pushing the sir back and forth and creating
sound waves. The sound waves travel out through the chip and away from the transducers. Those
waves bounce off objects in the environment, and the echoes return to the transducer array,
which measures the time it took the echoes to return. From the time of flight, we find
the location of the objects relative to the sensor. This allows us to enable new user
interfaces, like flipping through a photo gallery without even touching the screen.
This is the type of technology that we expect to beyond the borders of the university and
into numerous applications that will leverage the small size and low power dissipation of
this technology. We believe that by improving the way we interact with our devices, and
the way we interact with each other, we can make a better. smarter, more connected world.