A nanotechnology innovator Somalytics unveiled a miniature carbon-nanotube paper composite (CPC™) capacitive sensor: the SomaControl™ gesture monitor.
SomaControl™ is a 3D gesture monitor that can enable everyday tasks at home or integrated into gaming devices for a more immersive experience. It allows users to interact with and control a digital device using hand movements with no contact.
Somalytics is promising to bring better “sense” to the digital world by creating a new genre of gesture-based digital interfaces, wellness monitoring and safety applications. Its first-of-its-kind miniature sensor is flexible and highly sensitive to the human body. Mass production of Somalytics’ new capacitive sensors is expected to begin in 2022, ushering in a new era of human-machine interface applications that will save and improve lives.
Compared to existing capacitive sensors, Somalytics’ are 100 times smaller and 10 times faster, with greater range for sensing proximity and pressure. Offering unprecedented sensitivity to human tissue, the sensors acknowledge human presence at up to 20 centimeters.
They work with any skin tone or eye shape, recognize 3D gestures without need for any hand device, and are faster and better than infrared. All of this enables a new generation of touchless technology applicable to almost any interaction between humans and machines.
Better Eye Tracking
Somalytics’ sensors will open an entire new era for wearable eye tracking because the sensors are not camera based and there is no illumination of the eye required. The processing speed is under three milliseconds, and the sampling rate is 10 times faster than best-in-class existing technologies. With Somalytics’ sensors, eye tracking will evolve to accomplish the ‘real feel’ and ‘real-time eye to eye’ experience for which augmented and virtual reality users have long waited.
Somalytics Launch
In November, Somalytics was spun out of CoMotion at the University of Washington with support from hard science investment firm IP Group Inc. Somalytics’ patent-pending products are a new class of ultrahigh-sensitivity, fast-response, capacitive sensors built using substrate filled with carbon nanotubes developed at the University of Washington in the laboratory of Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Jae-Hyun Chung, Somalytics’ co-founder, and the laboratory of Assistant Professor of Environmental and Forest Sciences Anthony Dichiara.
