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."

Comments

What I really want....

[Crash42]

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...

Tilting pie menus

[SimHacker]

Here's a cool research paper from Sony's Computer Science Labs, about "tilting pie menus". I love it! I can't wait till all cell phones can sense tilt. Tilt control rocks!

Tilting Operations for Small Screen Interfaces (Tech Note)
By Jun Rekimoto, Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Inc. www.csl.sony.co.jp/person/rekimoto/papers/uist96.p df

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

Mercury switch vs Gyroscope?

[Koos Baster]

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?

Pseudo/alternate GPS use?

[Channard]

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.

Re:You WILL like this

[jridley]

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.

Why a gyroscope?

[pesc]

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!