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Google launches Ripple, an open standard that could bring tiny radars to Ford cars and more

Google soli radar project
İmage Credit: Google

Google has been publicly building tiny radar chips since 2015. They can tell you how well you sleep, control a smartwatch, count sheets of paper, and have you play the world's smallest violin. But the company's Soli radar hasn't necessarily seen commercial success, primarily in an ill-fated Pixel phone. Now Google has launched an open source API standard called Ripple that could theoretically bring the technology to additional devices outside of Google, possibly even a car, as Ford is one of the participants in the new standard.



Adritionally, the Github ripple project  is filled with  references to Google, including different instances of "Copyright 2021 Google LLC" and contributors must sign a Google Open Source license agreement to participate. (One commit points out that the project was updated “to include CTA.”) Ripple appears to be a rebranding of Google’s “Standard Radar API,” which it quietly proposed one year ago (PDF).

None of that makes it any less exciting that Soli might find new life, though, and there may be something to the idea that radar has privacy benefits. It’s a technology that can easily detect whether someone’s present, nearby, and/or telling their device to do something without requiring a microphone or camera.


Ford, for its part, tells The Verge that indoor radar might become part of its driver-assistance technologies. Right now, the automaker says it’s using “advanced exterior radars” to research those features instead (which sounds expensive to me). Here’s a statement from Ford’s Jim Buczkowski, who’s currently heading up the company’s Research and Advanced Engineering team:

We are investigating how to use indoor radar as a  source of sensors to improve various customer experiences in addition to our  Ford CoPilot360 driver assistance technologies which now use advanced exterior radars. A standard API, with input from the semiconductor industry, will allow us to develop hardware-independent software purchases and give  software teams the freedom to innovate across multiple radar platforms.

 
Other companies are also exploring radar: Amazon is also investigating whether radar could help it track your sleep patterns; This smart dog collar uses miniature radar to monitor vital signs, even if your dog is very hairy or furry, and this  bulb does the same  for humans.

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