Chip for recognition of 3D gestures through the electric field

Microchip Technology, a large American manufacturer of semiconductor devices, announced the release of the world's first chip MGC3130 , capable of determining the position of an object in space by a change in the electric field. It sounds tricky, but in fact, such technology promises a real breakthrough in creating interfaces. This means that you can create cheap devices without a camera that can accurately track the position of objects in space and recognize 3D gestures with a resolution of 150 dpi.



Today, 3D gesture recognition controllers are rare and usually work with a camera for pattern recognition. It is expensive and not too effective. That is why such devices are still not used universally in mobile phones. Among all chip manufacturers, only Qualcomm released the only chip for mobile devices with support for gesture recognition in the air (by processing image from the camera). In reality, this is really not a very effective solution, so the rest are not involved in such developments.


Qualcomm Snapdragon chip demo

The chip from Microchip Technology is able to change the market. It consumes a minimum of energy and is suitable for embedding in mobile phones, game joysticks and various consumer electronics. The key limitation is the radius of action: the chip operates at a distance of no more than 15 cm from a moving object. Despite this, the interface experts are sure that this is a truly revolutionary technology.

Low power consumption allows you to leave the chip constantly in operation. In this case, it can be used, for example, to turn on the phone or unlock it. That is, as a password to turn on the phone, you can use the code combination of finger movements set in advance. Imagine that you woke up, extended a hand towards the phone, made only your finger movements in the air, and the phone turned on.

Similar systems can be implemented in automotive electronics, keyboards, light switches, control panels, medical devices, etc. It may turn out to be so convenient that in ten years there will be no controllers at all that require physical contact.

The chip for recognizing 3D gestures through the electric field was developed by the German startup Ident Technology, which Microchip Technology bought a year ago.