14 DAY TRIAL // Smartwatches are already, dare I say it, smart, but they can always become smarter, and being capable of recognizing hand gestures is one way to achieve that.
That's what scientists from the University of California at Berkeley and Davis are making a tiny chip that can detect gestures in three dimensions.
The little thing uses ultrasound waves and, because of that, it is called Chirp.
For those who want to know the inner workings, it's all thanks to a small array of ultrasound transducers that send out small pulses of sound in a hemisphere. Depending on how those waves bounce off nearby objects and reflected, gestures are recognized.
Measuring the lag between the sent pulse and received echo plays a part too.
The range of the gesture recognition is supposed to be of 1 meter / 3 feet.
Don't hold your breath though. Even though an early prototype has been tested, watches aren't likely to incorporate this for a while. Not when gesture recognition is still iffy even on the display front.