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Google-Project-Soli

A new revolutionary technology is in the pipeline. Work is underway in Google labs to develop screens that can be manipulated by mid-air gestures. Gone are the days of typing errors, swiping mistakes, and screens stained by grubby fingers. The project that’s going to change it all? Project Soli.

Google, whose parent company, Alphabet, recently became the worlds most valuable company, is developing a radar-based technology that allows for the mid-air manipulation of ‘no-touch’ screens. “We want to break the tension between the ever-shrinking screen sizes used in wearables, as well as other digital devices, and our ability to interact with them,” a message on the companies website said.

The project website provides a video that shows the various methods of gestures being tested. Swiping, twisting, sliding, clicking, grabbing, the range of gestures are endless, as are the range of apps and technologies that could emerge as a result of it’s use. This could signal the end of remote controls, light switches, phones, dials and buttons to name but a few.

“The reason why we’re able to interpret so much from this one radar signal is because of the full gesture recognition pipeline that we’ve built. The various stages of this pipeline are designed to extract specific gesture information from this one radar signal that we receive at a high frame rate.” said Project Soli’s Lead Research Engineer, Jaime Lien.

While the release date of this technology is still unknown, Google are said to be inviting a small number of developers to try out the technology. Check out the video here.

 

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A is for Alphabet

It’s happened. The forceful have fallen. The changing of the guards perhaps. Apple have fallen behind Google’s Alphabet as the world’s most valuable company.

Alphabet pipped Apple to take the crown as the most valuable company on the planet, ending a four year rule of the market by the Californian iPhone maker. Alphabets shares rose 4.7% as the markets reacted. As of now, Alphabet is valued at $548 billion while Apple trail behind at $534 billion. While the crevice between the two mammoths is currently rather little, the gap is estimated to grow rather than shrink in the coming months and years.

What’s so appealing about Alphabet? Well since the company appeared in August, it has effectively become an umbrella for Google, YouTube, Android as well as all of Googles other various technological ventures, including self driving cars and high speed internet. .

Significantly, Alphabet plans to continue with its substantial interest in future tech improvement. While the likes of YouTube are generating an astonishing $66 million a day, some of the companies more extravagant experiments are costing them upwards of $3 billion. However, this isn’t much cause for concern, due to the emphasis on future creations. Alphabet, seemingly more so than any other company, have their eyes fixed far into the future, and have the capital behind them to create the future they want, which is pretty exciting.

On the contrast, Apple seem to be upgrading their past products rather than producing any new and exciting products. They seem to be playing it safe, with their only big innovative releases recently being the Apple Watch and the Apple Pencil, which, while giving their loyal followers extra gadgets and functionality, are not quite the ground breaking products that Apple used to release under the leadership of Steve Jobs. That being said, Apple must be doing something right, and the competition between the worlds two biggest companies can only be good for the consumer.