In 2011, as always, Google began to troll everyone on the occasion of April XNUMXst.
That year the joke was particularly realistic and engaging, attracting a huge number of interactions.
The widespread news concerned Gmail Motion, an unsuspected technology capable of eliminating the need for touchscreens on devices. They would be replaced by our gestures, allowing us to manage everything simply by waving our fingers in the air.
The demonstration, albeit exhilarating (with an unperturbed Google employee of the extraordinary poker face of being a star player) must have inspired something.
Remember it? There he is.
Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe not, but after 8 years today we know that in 2011 Google started the development of the Soli project, a microchip presented only now.
Soli turns what seemed like a joke into reality: uses a mini radar to capture objects and movements in a room. It is a very recent technology that could revolutionize the way we interact with devices.
Mice, keyboards, TouchPads, touchscreens and of course physical keys would be eliminated in favor of our gestures. The contact between two fingers combined with confirmation by the radar constitutes the heart of the interaction.
Imagine turning an imaginary knob and adjusting the volume, or scrolling through a piano by rubbing one finger over the other. The tiny system (chip, sensor and antenna are 8mm) captures body movements at very rapid speed and translates them into commands.
This of course would only be the beginning. The possible applications of this new chip are enormous. With an initial developer kit, a team at the University of St Andrews in Scotland began to "train" a computer to recognize objects in a room and orient itself in an environment.
Google Soli, as they explain near Mountain View, had a long and turbulent gestation. For two reasons, mainly: the technology itself, which is very advanced, and the radar's use of unauthorized frequencies.
The turning point came in January 2019, when the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) granted Google the license to operate on frequencies between 57 and 64 GHz.
And now some unconfirmed rumors, there are those who like it: many rumors on the net say that Brin and Page's company could use a first release of Soli already in the next Pixel 4 smartphones.
