Amazon’s upcoming smartphone is expected to have gesture interface

It is widely believed that Amazon’s 3D smartphone will be unveiled to the masses later this evening, which would be spot on according to an earlier rumor. Much has been said about the upcoming Amazon smartphone, including its ability to track one’s eyes as well as offer 3D gesture support, not to mention having a design that is allegedly thought up of by the folks over at HTC. Well, Bloomberg claims that the Amazon smartphone was inspired by the Nintendo Wii’s motion sensors that allowed gamers to move display objects around simply by making use of one’s head movements alone, resulting in the idea for a 3D handset sans the need for special glasses as you can see in the video right after the jump.

On Wednesday, Amazon will release a smartphone. It’s a huge bet for the online retailer and, in the moment, a nice vindication for the product managers and hardware hackers at Lab126, Amazon’s secretive Silicon Valley hardware division. More than 1,600 people claim Lab126 as their employer on the professional networking site LinkedIn. Just a few months ago, Amazon investors might reasonably have demanded to know what those expensive engineers and product managers—and many others working on device hardware and software from Amazon’s offices in Seattle and in Cambridge, Mass.—were actually doing. But this is turning out to be a big year for Lab126. Amazon released its Fire TV set-top box in April, to good reviews and endless promotion on the Amazon home page. Around the same time the company started quietly distributing the wand-likeAmazon Dash, which lets users of its AmazonFresh grocery service scan barcodes of everyday items and add them to their online shopping lists. Tomorrow’s announcement—and refreshes to the e-reader and tablets that are no doubt coming later this year—will make this the most productive year for Lab126 since Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos established the group to pursue a digital reading device back in 2004.