Technology | Elliptic Labs AS

Ultrasonic Touchless interaction enables the magic in your device!

Ultrasonic touchless gesture technology will make touchless interaction with your computer a feasible and strong solution. The advantages ultrasonic gesture technology has distinguishes it from other touchless technologies on the market. These qualities open up endless possibilities to equip your device with the latest and most intuitive interaction innovation. Ultrasonic sensors create a wide field of interaction space that surrounds your device and can be configured to detect a wide range of gestures and gesture combinations.

Advantages with ultrasonic gesture technology:

Wide field of view

Sensors can see both forward and to the sides, enabling an interaction zone extending over the screen and to the sides. Ultrasonic sensors enable gesturing both from a distance and very close to the screen at the same time

Distributed sensing

Enables motion capture from multiple angles, avoiding occlusion of objects or parts of an object.Facilitates robust positioning by giving sufficient sensor baselines. Sensors used are MEMS microphones, which can also be used for speech enhancement & recognition.

Leading edge detection & range gating

Ability to separate the first returning echoes from other, later arriving echos. Filter can effectively be created which thresholds reflections in the z-direction, useful both for separating finger motion from wrist or hand motion, or from movements or reflections from the body of use

Accurate time-of-flight measurements

Enables accurate tracking of leading edges of hands & fingers, as well as accurate location of devices having ultrasonic capabilities in space

To arrive at a robust solution, specific knowledge of the application needs to be incorporated into the solution strategy. This is a cross-disciplinary field where Elliptic Labs excels, combining its expertise in mathematics, physics & acoustics, engineering and human-computer-interaction.

History and background : Touchless Ultrasonic Sensing systems have a history dating at least back to the early eighties, when pioneering work was conducted by Haflich & Burns at MIT Electronic Music Studio. There is a trail of newer and older patent applications suggesting the use of ultrasound for presence and gesture recognition. Ultrasonic gestures are detected from signals transmitted by an ultrasonic transmitter and recording of the echoes bouncing off the various parts of hand. Ultrasonic sensors capture a vector of data per time frame, mapping the accumulated energy in the scene onto a set of range-specific elements. The total amount of data to be processed is relatively low, which is one of the reasons why ultrasound is a low power technology. Ultrasound still enables high performance and large interaction volume, making it ideal for gesture recognition in portable devices. Transducers for ultrasonic signals are these days getting smaller and inexpensive, and a target for their manufactures is to enable ultrasonic sensing as standard in most consumer electronic devices. This improves product integration and decreases the cost substantially, making ultrasonic gestures even more attractive in consumer electronics.