Project Soli is a new way of touchless interactions. It is a sensing technology that uses miniature radar to detect touchless gesture interactions. Talking about some of the devices where Project Soli can be embedded include wearables, phones, computers, cars and IoT devices.
Google's annual developer conference during the last day saw Google's ATAP (Advanced Technologies and Projects) taking the stage and showing off improvements to its gesture tracking technology, Project Soli, and its touch-sensitive fabric technology, Project Jacquard.
Dan Kaufman, Director of Google's ATAP team, during the keynote revealed some improvements to the Project Soli chip including reduced power consumption, roughly 5 percent improvement from the original chip. The new Soli chip also reduces computational power. These improvements finally make it usable in consumer facing products, though the company has not revealed a timeline for launch.
Google showed a concept smartwatch made using a LG Watch Urbane featuring Soli chip at I/O which worked completely based on gestures and could track small movements like waving of fingers. Ivan Poupyrev, Technical Program Lead at Google's ATAP, previewed some virtual tool gestures such as for interacting with the smartwatch users will need to use hands from a distance which will allow them to scroll through messages, and by pulling hand next to the watch users to interact with the watch. The watch basically responds to the proximity of the hands to the watch. At I/O 2016, Google also showed a speaker from JBL by Harman which featured Soli chip and allowed hand gestures to control the music from the speaker.