The invention of radar is thought to be one of the most crucial developments in military technology of the last century.
With experiments taking place just before the outbreak of the Second World War, radar’s object-locating abilities were ideally placed to scoop up funding from governments around the world as they prepared for conflict.
For the first time, radio waves could be transmitted, bounced off far-away objects and detected again, allowing boats and aircraft to work out where other vessels were located.
Spinning radar sensors were placed on warships and air traffic control towers and now, more than 80 years later, the technology has been adapted and miniaturised, with incredible results.
Following major breakthroughs in hardware, researchers from the University of St Andrews think that it might soon be used to boil the kettle – using only your coffee cup.
A human and computer interactions research group from the university worked on a Google-backed developer programme to explore how radar might be incorporated into our daily lives by placing transmitters in our phones, televisions and kitchen appliances.
While early radar was used for large-object location, such as detecting enemy warships, Professor Andrew Quigley says that the latest technology can fit a radar receiver and transmitter on to a tiny microchip.
He said: “What really opened it up is this notion that the receiving antenna and the transmitting antenna are all fabricated on to the same surface. It’s printed on to a very small chip, about the size of your fingernail.”
“If you go back to the radar that was used during the war, the installations were massive.
“And if you go back to the decades after that, the size of radar was for very large-scale, long-distance detection of very small objects very far away.”
Using miniaturised radar sensors built into the devices we use every day, Mr Quigley says that we could control devices without even touching them.
He says that instead of using your hand to gesture and control something, people will actually use objects to control computers and revolutionise everyday living.
For example, this could mean building a kettle activated by a normal coffee cup, or a casino table that can distinguish between the cards and monitor a game of poker for cheating.
Mr Quigley said: “Designers and developers can imagine looking at a kettle and saying, ‘Oh, there’s a physical button there. But there’s a unit that I have to actually put into the kettle to have a physical button, and I could replace all of that with a radar chip’.
“You could gesture at it, but you could also use an object.
“If you put your cup near your kettle, and it’s your coffee cup, the kettle knows to boil the water in a particular way. Or if you put a different cup there, it knows you will have tea, so it could it boil it in a different way.
“You could put these sensors into a casino, and then the entire casino experience could become digitised,” Mr Quigley said.
“The cards, the chips, the dice, the dominoes: whatever elements you have.”
The group has already been approached by companies that think radar sensors could monitor what shoppers buy as they travel around the store, eliminating the need for a checkout.
“While the possibilities of the new technology seem endless, the project began with just a small and competitive developer programme run by Google.
The team at St Andrews were the only developers in the UK to gain access to the programme, and used their paper to explore the way that radar sensors can recognise physical objects in the home or workplace.
In a video published by the team, they demonstrate a radar sensor counting playing cards, measuring the angle of a mobile phone and simulating a card game.
On Tuesday, Google received approval from US regulators to put their Project Soli sensors into mobile phones.
The Federal Communications Commission ruling said the radar chips “will serve the public interest by providing for innovative device control features using touchless hand gesture technology” and could help disabled users.
Alongside the object-activated system developed by the St Andrews team, Google says that radar chips would allow users to press imaginary buttons or turn virtual dials to operate its devices, or operate screens by waving your hand, similar to the technology featured in the film Minority Report.
For Mr Quigley and his team, use of radar might change the way we use our devices forever.
“We’ll look back on today in 50 or 100 years’ time, and it will look quaint,” he said.
“We’re stuck on a plateau right now. If there is no keyboard then people just freak out. If that’s the way you understand how to talk to a computer then of course that’s how you’re going to talk to it.
“But if your cup can be all you need to interact with a computer in the morning then you don’t need a keyboard.”
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