Patents Point to Soli-Equipped Pixel Watch With Plenty of Gesture Controls

https://www.droid-life.com/2020/05/18/patents-point-to-soli-equipped-pixel-watch-with-plenty-of-gesture-controls/

Read the original post: Patents Point to Soli-Equipped Pixel Watch With Plenty of Gesture Controls

We have been talking about the possibility of a Pixel Watch for two solid years, with the first mention of the smartwatch happening back in May of 2018. Given that timing, it’s fitting that this week, patents belonging to Google have been uncovered and posted to the web, detailing what we might be able to expect from a Pixel Watch.

In the illustrations below that are paired with the patents, we can see a hand with a smartwatch being worn, complete with hand gestures being done. These gestures are being translated into actions on the device likely by a Soli radar chip, which takes us back to Google I/O in 2016 when Google and its Project Soli team first detailed all of this tech.

As an example, check out Figure 4. In this drawing, we can see that if a user uses a finger to tap on their thumb, it can create an action on the smartwatch. If users can assign different tasks to each finger, and Motion Sense (Soli) can recognize all of that movement, this could be pretty special.

According to Patently Apple who published all of this, the patent application was filed in January, 2019 and published last week by the US Patent Office. Given that timing, there’s no way of knowing if we’ll see any of this in a device that’s “coming soon.” With Google’s acquisition of Fitbit recently, we have to be getting closer, right?

// Patently Apple

via Droid Life: A Droid Community Blog https://ift.tt/2dLq79c

May 18, 2020 at 12:44PM

See which states still have increasing rates of COVID-19

https://www.popsci.com/story/health/covid-cases-rising-states/

Some places are starting to reopen—but it may still be too early

Some places are starting to reopen—but it may still be too early (Dmitry Dreyer/Unsplash/)

We’re all pretty sick of staying home by now. It’s been at least a couple long months of isolation for most Americans at this point, and as news about COVID-19 hotspots like New York City has gotten progressively less dire, more people have been itching to get out and asking at what point we’ll open back up again.

That sentiment has spurred some states to start re-opening businesses and letting people back into public spaces. But the problem is the US hasn’t experienced one unified pandemic. Each state, and even regions within each state, has followed its own trajectory, and that means a sunnier outlook in one place doesn’t mean others should be so optimistic.

By looking at the tallies of new cases per day, we can get a sense of where each state is in the course of this first wave.

Each state is on its own trajectory

Each state is on its own trajectory (Infographic by Sara Chodosh/)

Some areas that have been hotspots, like New York and New Jersey, have seen significant declines in the past week or two that have given locals some hope for the future. But in much of the rest of the country, cases have either plateaued or are still rising. Alabama, New Mexico, Texas, and New Hampshire are just a few examples. Ironically, many of the states that are still fully shut down are the ones with falling case rates. Most of the country is at least partially reopened, with a handful more scheduled to do so soon.

In the beginning of the pandemic, many rural areas experienced a strange few weeks where the country shut down completely, yet cases in their regions stayed low. Media outlets reported on the dire situation in New York City, but everything seemed fine elsewhere. It started to seem like everyone was staying home for nothing. Part of the problem is that the virus started spreading in dense areas like New York and California much earlier on, so as things were ramping up on the coasts, the middle of the country felt largely unaffected. Now, however, cases are starting to rise in those previously unscathed areas—right as everyone is opening back up.

Even places that controlled COVID-19 well, like Germany and South Korea, are seeing resurgences of the virus after trying to restart their economies. That doesn’t bode well for the US, which largely hasn’t gotten things under control and is only just starting to have high levels of testing.

The unfortunate reality is that things aren’t going to be normal for a long time. These are unprecedented times—patience is vital.

via Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now https://www.popsci.com

May 18, 2020 at 07:07AM