Slashdot Mirror
Gyroscope Gives CellPhones 'Tilt Control'
Paul Stamatiou writes "You can now control cellphone activities by simply tilting it.
"If you have a game involving keeping a car on the road, you do that by tilting," says company spokesman Jan Ahrenbring. The tilting technique can also be used to sweep large virtual pages across the phone's screen, which acts as window on the information."
It will probably work just like the damn joystick on my phone... Or the Service (T-Mobile)...
The way I see it, this whole cell phone thing is really starting to suck.
Didn't Palm (sorry, Pa1m!) have a patent a year or so ago about this moving-a-window-on-a-bigger-virtual-screen thing?
... with a Gameboy Advance game, Kirby's Pinball - you put the cart in, moved the GBA abound and the onscreen character reacted appropriately.
is a $20 phone with a 200 hours batterylife for making phonecalls. I don't want a $2000 mp3 playing, fm radio, camera, tilt controlled gamecosole, pda, alarmclock thingy wich btw can also be used (if you ever might want to) to make phonecalls...
....Excuse me, but
pros:
- my seimens phone is now so small I can't reliably grasp it and press keys.. need somethign else to control now (or just return the phones to hand sized)
- it could standardize some controls (think t9) as opposed to a new set of buttons to think about on every brand
cons:
- we have enough gesturing while driving
- you can't reliably track something that's in motion (try reading a book thaqt you're waving back and forth, then try reading when the book ist still and your head is moving - big difference)
- i don't want the gyroscopic effect when i'l trying to wrestle with the phone (ok, they'll likely be small) or the dam thing precessing while on my driver's seat...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Tilting Operations for Small Screen Interfaces (Tech Note)p df
By Jun Rekimoto, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Inc. www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/papers/uist96.
HTML version from google:
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:xf0Rxikgk34J: www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/papers/uist96.p df+tilt+pie+menu&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
So every time someone bumps into me on the train or it jerks on the tracks I'm going to lose my place in a document?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
IMHO even a very small gyroscope seems pretty impractical wrt. (innertial) forces, size and battery life. How about simply using mercury switches to measure/estimate the cell phone's position?
Oh how nice. You just use your cellphone to make calls.
Thank you for your input. I DON'T CARE.
I don't even know why the vast batallions of people who insist on saying "Hi! I only use my phone for making calls!" think they're saying anything new or original.
If all you care about is making phone calls, there are lots of good, cheap phones which just do that. The VTech A700 comes right to mind--it's cheap, weighs nearly nothing, and just to keep all these people who insist on mentioning that they don't want their phones to do anything fun, has NO FEATURES. (Oh wait, I lied, it can send text messages. Sorry if that's too overwhelming a proliferation of features for y'all.)
If you don't like gadgets that do cool stuff...what the heck are you doing on Slashdot?!
And for the dude who bitches that all he wants is a few days of battery life and clear audio--hey, perhaps you should get rid of that 1989-standard brick and spend the twenty bucks to get a phone made this century! I've enjoyed crystal-clear audio and nice long battery life with every phone I've bought since 2000.
In the meantime, I'll just enjoy my own phone--it has a color display, polyphonic ringers, a web browser with freakin' Java, a built-in FM radio, a speakerphone, and it's tiny and weighs 83 grams (that's less than 3oz for the American readers). Oh yeah, and it can go for a week between charges and I can talk for hours on it.
Could this perhaps be used as a pseudo GPS system? Rather than determining your position by a GPS signal, could have data on gradients of an area and have the PDA in your car in some sort of cradle to hold it flat. Then the PDA would detect when you were going up a hill (the software would have to discount speed bumps) and update your shown position. Provided you kept to the roads, by checking your car's angle it could determine your exact position, at worst it could be used to show were on a contour map you were.
Why? As a programmer, what the HELL could they want you for that wouldn't wait until tomorrow? Yes, if you're a sysadmin and something breaks, or if you're in charge of something online, they may need you now. But if the boss decides to address bug #132203 that's been on the books for two months, I think he can wait until tomorrow.
I finally bought a cell phone for my wife and I to keep in contact easier. I tried to give it to my boss (I'm a programmer with some responsibility for an on-line service) but he refused to take it, saying that nothing was that important that it couldn't wait until tomorrow. He did take it eventually when I went on a 2 week vacation but he never called it, even when there was trouble; he found someone else to deal with it, even though he knew I could have handled it faster.
Now, if the phone would use a 2-axis or even better 3-axis gyro, it could be used for navigation, even in GPS-uncovered areas (buildings...). It's the same principle they use in planes for the so called INS - inertial nav system.
Just imagine the possibilities of such a navigation system. Finally, there's no more excuse for not finding the office of your PHB in a new building .
Most modern phones have a camera. Why not just activate it and perform some image processing. Now you can determine how you tilt the phone just by looking through the camera.
Another nifty thing you could do; if the camera is on the back-side of your phone, you should be able to activate it and use the phone as an optical mouse. Just slide the phone on your desk, and the mouse pointer on the phone screen moves. Cute eh?
Maybe I should patent this and get rich?
But now I have already written about it on slashdot. Too late. Damned slashdot, hindering innovation like this!
)9TSS
Nintendo had a similar engine in Kirby's Tilt 'n' Tumble for the Gameboy Color, where the player had to tilt the Gameboy to make Kirby roll. And the gyroscope thing was inside the game cartridge too.
:)
Too bad the GBA SP loads the cartridges from below, making the game unplayable.