You can control this Bluetooth speaker with hand gestures

There’s often times when you can’t either get to your phone, or shouldn’t be touching it, so controlling the speaker connected to your phone with a wave of your hand is a great solution that the folks at HPB have come up with for the Wave Gesture Controlled speaker.

The Wave is a simple bluetooth speaker, with a mic built-in on the front. The speaker is not terribly powerful at just 4Ω/3W and it’s sort of angled backwards but it’s enough to have a bit of music or a podcast playing on a bench top or mounted on the dash in the car. You can use hand gestures to control the speaker once paired to the phone, with gestures for both music playback and answering calls. For music controls, you can pause/play music, skip forward/back or increase/decrease the volume and for phone calls, you can answer or hang up and change the volume.

The gesture area is 42° with the panel mounted on the front and gestures have to be within about 10-15cm of the unit. The gesture panel has a ring of LEDs that indicate gesture response and volume, as well as showing a charge indicator when you plug it in. It’s actually quite intuitive to use, though there’s some learning curve to ensure you get the gesture right as you can see:

It has a tiny 500mAh battery and charges with microUSB but you could just leave it plugged in on the bench while you’re cooking and listening to a podcast or what not. There’s a range of colours available including pink, white and black and it’s sort of a cool little speaker to have sitting on the bench in the shed or kitchen when you have dirty hands.

The HPB Wave isn’t terribly expensive either at around $49USD, though finding one is going to be difficult as they sell through their WeChat store, which we can’t access. They are looking for distributors though, so hopefully they’ll be getting them widely available soon.