LG will be launching the LG G8 ThinQ at MWC 2019. As with what LG has done in the past, the company is slowly teasing features of the upcoming phone ahead of the launch. More recently LG teased that the LG G8 will come with a sound-on display, and now it seems that the company has also confirmed that the phone will support touchless gestures.
The company had previously teased that the LG G8 will support gestures that will not require the user to touch the phone, and now they have gone into detail about the sensor that will help facilitate that. This comes in the form of a “Time of Flight” sensor that is built by LG Innotek’s division.
How this works is that it reflects infrared light off a subject. It will then measure how long it takes for that light to return and use that data to calculate the depth. This sensor has been used in the past for things like facial recognition and also augmented reality, but LG seems to be applying it for use with gestures.
According to LG, this means that users will be able to interact with their device using their face or their hands. It will also come in handy when you have a pair of gloves on and need to interact with your device. At the moment we don’t know what kind of touchless gestures will be supported just yet, but come MWC 2019, LG should have all those details for us.
It sounds like an interesting feature and as we have mentioned in the past, this is a feature that we’ve sort of seen before. In the past we’ve seen some manufacturers launch features where users could hover their fingers above their screen to interact with it without touching it. This will be probably be a huge improvement over that, but whether it will be useful or novel remains to be seen.