Hacker News Reader

Comment by fasicle | Hacker News Reader

Would be useful when cooking with mess on your hands and trying to scroll through a recipe.

This is the one and only suggestion so far that makes sense. It would be nice when cooking. If I was sitting in a bus/train/plane/concert/<public space>, there is no chance in hell I am waving my hands at a phone. I would even feel silly doing it at home.

Controlling audio also seems pretty big with the assumption that gestures work "through various materials for seamless interaction" as the website says. The dial, slide, and swipe gestures look perfect for adjusting volume and skipping songs without taking your phone out of your pocket. Technically a smart watch could also do this (though I'm not sure if it'd be equally smooth), but I also can't remember the last time I saw someone wearing a smart watch (YMMV, I'm in the midwest).

It seems like it'd work well in the general case of "I want to control a device that I can't touch". There's lots of reasons you wouldn't want to touch a device (dirty/non-free hands, device is out of reach, device doesn't have a screen, etc) and a lot of devices you'd want to control from afar (televisions, radios, speakers, AC units, alarm clocks, or arguably phones, I guess). It'll be interesting to see what uses emerge from that intersection once other kinds of devices get Soli.

I wonder if it'd be useful for more crazy ideas that fit into "giving a device more information about physical actions nearby" (like sleep tracking), but I don't know how realistic those are.

Controlling audio doesn't seem like a perfect use case at all.

When you control volume you usually want to make it quiet and stay quiet - e.g. someone is sleeping but you want to continue working (moving) and you don't want to accidentally turn it back up.

The other time when you control volume is when you want to make it louder and then dance (moving) and you don't want the volume to jump up and down.

Only other case that I can think of is when you want to turn the volume up or down just a tiny bit, which actually seems like the worst use case for this technology.

You can extend this to mechanics/technicians. Manipulating a large screen when your hands are full of grease.

I just spent most of this year rebuilding the engine in my SUV and this would've been an incredible feature. I either greased up my phone when I needed to look something up, or had to take off my latex gloves, which are a pain to get back on when your hands were all sweaty.

but can't the front camera do that with a simple gestures classifier ?

Probably, but that doesn't sell $650 phones

I like the privacy aspect "it's not a camera, it doesn't take picture"

It does send millimetre waves though, could that mean we could hack Soli to view through clothes ? Like a full-body scanner works ?

Don't forget wet hands (after a shower maybe) and gloves too. But yeah I agree right now the much better use is detecting when you're near, but for saving battery and for speeding up Face ID.

That being said, the website near the bottom show cases finer controls, such as scrolling and turning a dial. I could see these being added in the future for finely controlling some UI elements without your finger blocking the way.

> Would be useful when cooking with mess on your hands and trying to scroll through a recipe.

Even then, your hands might be busy here and a voice interaction may be better.

A ziplock bag already does that.

And you don't see any benefit of not having to put your phone in a ziplock bag?

I sure do, but it seems like an overkill to upgrade my phone just so I don't have to put it in a ziplock bag.

It makes more sense to upgrade the kitchen equipment to provide this functionality.

But then again, I don't see a point in sending all of my movements to a server in cloud just so I can scroll down a recipe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com