Making a gesture
Finnish mobile handset giant Nokia has got into the habit of showing-off stuff it's developing in its labs. The latest innovation concerns the use of an active radar sensor in phones to measure the speeds and direction of nearby objects.
Why the hell would I want to do that - we hear you ask. Well, if your phone can accurately sense the movement of your body - especially your arms - then that creates the potential for it to interpret your gestures and accept them as commands.
This is just a prototype, of course, and you can imagine all the software issues that have to be overcome in order to make this useful, and prevent you ringing someone up every time you scratch your head, but as a sign of things to come it's interesting. Combined with technologies like near field communications (NFC), we may end up hardly ever having to actually touch our phones in future.
If you happen to find yourself in the vicinity of Espoo, Finland, you can see this and 40 other bits of cleverness at Demo House 2010. You can see the full list of demos on offer here, but if you can't make it, here's a video from Nokia's official blog instead.
