gesture control

The Google Pixel 4 leaks are off with a bang this week, with imagery of the phone lineup and features coming in hot and heavy. Clues appearing today suggest there's a sort of feature that'll make use of the Project Soli sensor first revealed by Google in 2015 (and approved by the FCC for testing early this year). Android Aware, or Pixel Aware, it's likely called, or just "Aware". This system could change the way we interact with smartphones forever.

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It isn’t dropping any hints about its rumored foldable or modular dual screen phone but LG has practically confirmed two things it will be revealing next month. While it’s almost a no brainer that it will be talking about the 5G buzzword as well, LG’s invitation to its MWC 2019 press event seems to confirm rumors that it will have a smartphone that won’t require you to touch it or even speak to it just to use it.

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In Google's future, smartphones and such won't necessarily need touchscreens to operate. Instead, with the technology they call Soli, users will be able to control their smart devices with a wave of their hand. While this sort of technology isn't technically completely new, the level to which these gestures will operate is now being taken out a whole new door.

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Over the past week we've played with the Air Hogs Supernova, a tiny drone made to be minimal. This drone is controlled with an on-switch and sensors. The user tells the drone what to do and how to act with a series of gestures - hand signals in the air - and all power is provided by a charging cable that's not unlike what smartphone users have for their smartphone. This drone is just about as simple as a drone gets.

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It seems that the next smartphone trend after notches are button-less, swipe-based, pill-using navigation gestures. And, like the notch, we have Apple and its iPhone X to thank, or curse, for that. Android P will unabashedly have its own gestured-based navigation UI. If you're a fan of that feature, however, you need not wait that long or forever to get it. The folks over at XDA have released their own Navigation Gestures app that offers exactly that and a lot more. But while the app doesn't require root access, you'll need to aware of two important things before you go any further.

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You've probably noticed by now, but a lot of today's flagship phones have very similar feature lists and specification sheets. As a result, many manufacturers are looking for ways to make their phones stand out from the crowd. This isn't limited to just the realm of Android, either, as Apple is said to be considering two big features for future iPhones that could help differentiate them in an increasingly crowded market.

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A patent published this week points to Google having a deep knowledge of spacially aware gestures for control of devices of all sorts. We'd known that Google was working on tech to recognize our hands swiping through the air as controls for smartphones - but this is a bit different. This expands upon that - beyond the realm of pre-configured controls and into the world of DIY.

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Although it is a highly capable smartphone in its own right, the HTC U11 would have probably been overshadowed by the likes of the Galaxy S8 or even the OnePlus 5 if not for two things. One is a camera highly praised by DxOMark. The other is its squeezable Edge Sense gestures. Not unlike Samsung's Bixby, the version of Edge Sense that new HTC U11 owners got was raw and underwhelming. Now the company is assuring customers that more are yet to come, starting with these actions.

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Smartwatches are nifty hi-tech toys, but, unless they mature soon, they will remain as such, toys. In the face of competition from more focused, not to mention cheaper, smart fitness bands, smartwatches have a hard time breaking out of its niche market. That, however, doesn’t mean smartwatches aren’t capable. In fact, even run of the mill ones pack a piece of hardware that, when fine tuned and exploited, can actually make the smartwatch feel like a device from the future. And that hardware is none other than the accelerometer.

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We’re probably still a few decades away from a Minority Report computer display and interface and we’re definitely a few fictional universes removed from having enough Midichlorians to be Force-sensitive. So anything that gives us a semblance of telekinetic abilities, with hand-waving of course, is more than welcome. And there are a lot of those today. But what sets Bixi apart, at least based on its promise, is that it is the smallest, cheapest, most accurate, and most rugged gesture recognition device you’ll ever need to control anything from your smartphone to the GoPro camera sitting on your head.

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Most smartwatches these days, except for the likes of the Pebble, have touch screens that try to make using these wearable devices easier. But unlike the bigger touchscreens on our smartphones, the surface area of smartwatches make it harder to utilize multi-touch gestures. As such, most of the time users are limited to taps, tap and hold, and swipes. Researchers from the University of St. Andrews are proposing a new interaction method they have dubbed as WatchMI, which adds three more touch-based gestures to any smartwatch, without requiring additional hardware at all.

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When Apple introduced Force Touch and 3D Touch, it expanded the vocabulary of gestures we can use on smartphones by 1. However, it is still touch-based, short of mind control, the number of ways we can interact with our smartphones are basically limited to touch, voice, and some rudimentary Jedi hand waves. Engineers from the University of Michigan are working on yet another gesture, one that is both interesting yet almost comical at the same time. They want you to be able to squeeze your smartphone, not to death, but to control it.

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