Watching Nintendo think out loud about radar and music (Interconnected)

I love watching companies when they’re thinking out loud. Because it gets me thinking too (not necessarily in the same direction).

There’s a sequence where the person is rolling in bed, half asleep, and Mario coin sounds are rattling off. Subtitle: [Super Mario Odyssey sounds continue]

Radar chips have applications in autonomous vehicles and robotics, but putting them in consumer electronics is fascinating. Radar is hard to interpret - it’s not a straightforward computer vision problem - but it can see through (non-conductive) walls, it can be used (in theory) to pick out gestures and eye blinks and breathing and heartbeats because it’s high resolution and building up a 3D scene, and it’s on a chip and doesn’t require a camera.

Oh, and mmWave radar is low power – though interpreting the data requires serious compute. Here’s the Infineon site for their radar sensors.

How would you, as a design team and as a company, develop sufficient opinions about how mmWave radar behaves in real-world environments and what you could do with it? And what is it like to integrate, and what is the supply chain like, and so on?

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