Optical 3D imagers for gesture recognition, such as Microsoft Kinect, suffer from large size and high power consumption. Their performance depends on ambient illumination and they generally cannot operate in sunlight. These factors have prevented widespread adoption of gesture interfaces in energy- and volume-limited environments such as tablets and smartphones. Gesture recognition using sound is an attractive candidate to overcome these difficulties because of the potential for chip-scale solution size, low power consumption, and ambient light insensitivity. Our research focuses on building an ultrasonic depth sensor system using batch-fabricated micromachined aluminum nitride (AlN) ultrasonic transducer arrays and custom CMOS electronics.
Project end date: 12/13/13