Ultrasonic: A Tool That Can Make Your Device Truly Hands-Free
Ever wondered if it’s time to bid the whole keyboard and mouse a grand farewell considering touch is fast becoming the norm. Well, the engineers at Knowles seem to be working hard to make sure that you don’t even have to touch your smartphone or tablet to get your tasks done.
Knowles is a legendary company with a long history of over 60 years. In fact Neil Armstrong’s most revered words, “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind,” were spoken into a Knowles microphone. Guess that sets the credibility of the company to set the claims for what it is offering.
The company has developed a mic called ultrasonic. It is about the size of the tip of a pen. This mic can hear sound waves that are inaudible to the human ear. It captures the waves emitted from special speakers installed in a smartphone or a tablet. The device the uses those signals to triangulate and track the hand movements and give the desired output.
The Pen-Tip sized sensor is capable of letting you use your devices hands free.
Ultrasonic can track gestures and movements to a distance of 4 to 12 inches from the display. The device manufacturers have installed additional sensors in their camera to add similar features, but they only can track motion up to 2 inches from the screen. Ultrasonic’s feature will let people give a presentation on their devices, and they can flip through slides with ease. The device also utilizes less power than the camera solution as it works on sound waves.
The executives at Knowles are enthusiastic about this technology and say they are ready to market it to top device manufacturers. The device has already been bought for tests by some small manufacturers. They ultimately want the device to feature in devices from brands like Samsung and Apple and make the technology mainstream.
Most of the companies already add three microphones to their devices for better voice capturing and noise cancellation. The companies would only have to add one more mic input into their devices to make Knowles’ unique interaction system work.
This sounds like a great new feature to have in our smart devices. The Smartwatch segment can greatly benefit from this. The tiny display often get covered while they are touched; a gesture interaction will really come handy. We’ll be waiting for this to come to the market.
