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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."
going to be a distraction while driving...no matter what.
How about 3 day battery life with 6 hours talk time?
How about good, clear calls?
How about not magically losing signal when I walk in to another room?
"If you have a game involving keeping a car on the road, you do that by tilting,"
How about you try keeping your car on the road by NOT talking while driving?
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.
.. about a guy whose car went off the road while he was tilting his mobile trying to keep a virtual car on the road.
...just talking on a phone is difficult enough for some people, let alone waving your hands around like a madman.
Didn't Palm (sorry, Pa1m!) have a patent a year or so ago about this moving-a-window-on-a-bigger-virtual-screen thing?
Yeah tilt it and you cannot read it anymore. That won't cause more frustration on the highway.
Which 'company spokesman'?
This sig has been deprecated.
It's a Cell Phone...
No, it's a camera...
No, it's a video game...
No, it's a breakfast cerial...
When I thought of digital convergence, this isn't what I had in mind...
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
Then I guess using it while being drunk is out of the question.
the technology used in this case might be more advanced (gyroscope), but the idea of tilting the phone to activate a function or control something isn't new. i had a casio watch many years back that would automatically turn on the backlight for a few seconds if you lifted up your wrist to look at it. i'm not sure this is a good thing though...just one more thing to keep drivers who shouldn't be on the road in the first place distracted.
... with a Gameboy Advance game, Kirby's Pinball - you put the cart in, moved the GBA abound and the onscreen character reacted appropriately.
Gits.
... just tilt it vigorously against a wall.
But he adds that consumers will have to be convinced that the technology is useful.
How about stop all the crap 'features' that people have to be convinced are useful, and just get the damn things to work...
(blissfully, I don't really care, because I remain cellphone anchor-free)
What next, self-parking cell phones? More games, more on positioning (Cell towers can already triangulate where the cell phone is, why not provide GPS already!!!) new cameras give me a break is it a phone, or ( gameboy | television | handheld PC | camera ) Give me a break I am so sick and tired of hearing about new things that are added to phones, so that they may charge more and more for them, tilting a phone, what! Seriously sounds cool, but what if you live on a hill does it take in to account calibration! -Holla
Is is only me, but I'm surpised every time some company comes up with some new feature for a cellphone, and they demonstrate it by saying it might come in handy when playing a game? Every new phone is marketeered by saying how much games it has, how much ringtones, how easily you can change the cover,...
I can't think of a good thing I can do with a phone with a gyroscope in it right now. I assume that anyone can come up with some basic telephone feature that is still missing. One I can come up with is "if busy, present a callback function (Call back in 30 seconds? Yes/No)". Another one is "answer and delete message".
Oh boy, if only I would design phones...
Is it like this or this or this And this goes back to 1999. Ahh but its on a phone now. Quick, I'd better patent it before someone else does. Bah.. Old idea. Just a new application.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
They keep trying to use this "tilt" technology somewhere. I first saw it at PC Expo several years ago (but before it became "techxNY" or whatever) - It was a SD card add on for a palm V. They were making a big deal out of scrolling maps with it. I demoed it, and tried to be polite about it, but the fact is that it is useless.
There is much less control in tilting a palm while trying to watch the screen scroll, and then tilting it to level again to read the map - and once you tilt it level, you have to switch the toggle to stop it scrolling if you tilt it up to look at it.
It reminds me of those games where you have a marble and have to make it fall in the hole in the middle of a big plate - you always overshoot the hole and end up on the other end.
It's a dumb way to solve a problem that has already been solved via scroll bars and/or buttons.
Bah no news... My girlfriend has been tilting the control on our PlayStation for many years now when she do an extra sharp turn in SSX...
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
I knew New Scientist covered cutting edge technology, but now they're reporting technology from the future? The date stamp at the top of that article is:
16:12 18 July 04
Eddies in the space time continuum again?
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."
Kirby Tilt and Tumble for Game Boy Color used a tilt sensor to control a pink puffball that rolled around on the screen. (It's one of the few games that won't work well on the SP or on the Game Boy Player.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
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
Tilting? I guess there'll be an interesting version available for this cellphone's Pinball game!
We reported it twice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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
worst gadget idea, ever
"How did this happen?"
"Eddies in the space-time continuum."
"What??!?"
"Eddies in the space-time continuum."
"My God! Eddie! Eddie! Get out of there!"
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?
This would be fantastic for a game such as the 1984 classic Marble Madness
Trolling is a art,
The itsy had one of those a while back one of those Compaq/HP research PDA's that features the "rock'n'scroll" control. Much the same and now quite old.
Jon - TheSpork
When the obvious is to offer a pick-up feature that doesn't involve pressing buttons?
OK that's harder than you might think. Especially during roller-coaster rides.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
n/t
I'm convinced a cell phone with mind reading abilities will exist before something useful and integrated is introduced into these devices. What a scam!
A blog like any other.
If it's a powerful gyroscope, I can drink enough to fall over, yet stand upright while making a phone call -- !
-kgj
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.
Also from this months Stuff Magazine there is a perview of this phone on the inside back cover. One other funky thing it can do is that if you rotate it 90 degrees it will actually flip the screen orientation
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
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.
I don't think a patent is likely as there would be (homemade) prior art.
JeR
For some reason you Americans (though eminently logical in most areas) persist in believing that you live in a free market. A free market is one where government does not choose the winners but defines the rules and allows any player to compete. The USA just does not work like this: most significant industries are incredibly regulated, and telecoms is one of these. Energy is another.
The USA's "free market" is anything but. For a really free market in telecoms, you have to look to countries where there is no anti-competitive parastate monopoly.
Amazingly, also the countries with the cheapest and often best mobile phone services.
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Finally, I can get that 'Labyrinth' game on my cell phone. It's just what I've been waiting for all these years, a computerized version of 'Labyrinth'. My journey is now complete.
I can imagine that tilting the phone would be quite annoying in many lighting conditions. I tend to hold an electronic device in the rare position which doesn't produce glare or reflections, yet fits within a useful reading angle.
[
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 .
Think motion patterns, rather than absolute grids. Apparently, everyone has a distictive way to make that figure-8. The combination may even provide a medium-grade access control. This is even more useful when phones and wallets are combined. We need to think beyond buttons and their 2.01 - D rendering on screens. Just like previous generations did have to learn to deal with buttons. Motion patterns are closer to normal human infrastructure anyway. Think learning to play a musical instrument. Or even to learn to talk. Especially in the latter is no real "grid" precision. Motion recognition would enable a very wide range of options without having to step through tedious menu hierarchies. And without dozens of buttons. So all the "(phone) real estate" can be spent on display.
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
..can't you see the interactive applications of tilt/movement of portable devices that also have a vibrating ringtone function.
I'm just saying it seems the sex trades are the first to jump into new technology. (I'm still waiting for the multi-camera function of DVDs to appear in anything but adult entertainment)
Did I mention they also have cameras??
"Hey old man, this cell's got a gyro. What do you know?"
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.
I think this technology is different than the stuff they've been doing with Palms for a decade now.
The Palm stuff has all been Accelerometers, which are cheap becuase you need them to control airbags. They can detect change in orientation, but don't really know the orientation of the device, so you tilt and come back to level and have to tell the device it is level again. It might be able to do an OKAY job of knowing it's tilt at a given time, but the sampling rate will eventually make it necessary to hit that button telling it where straight and level is.
The Gyroscope stuff is different, I assume it always knows which way is up, like avionics do. It's probably got a much higher degree of accuracy as well. Maybe it could do navigation? Maybe some games would be really fun? Maybe you could invent some new way of input (i.e. phyical graffitti)?
But bottom line, I have yet to hear of a great application for this technology either. Any ideas I have would be solved by an electric compas.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I want a cell phone with a big honking gyro that resists any attempt to change its orientation in space. When I put it on my belt clip and try to turn a corner, I want it to precess, fall off my belt, hit the ground with the antenna downward, and slowly rotates around in a cone-shaped evolute. I want it to exercise my wrist muscles when I pick it up and clip it on again.
It would be JUST as useful as that silly tilt control, and a lot cooler.
I also want it to have flip-out accessories for clipping nails, opening cans, and extracting stones from horse's hooves.
I've given up on the things ever being reliable ways to make telephone calls.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
While this could be done with a gyroscope, that would be an incredible waste of energy (motor+cellphonebatteries=BAD). What I hope they mean is a simple spherical mercury switch.
Reading about this story makes one German word in particular spring to mind (no babelfish required either):
Schadenfreude
"If you have a game involving keeping a car on the road, you do that by tilting,"
Oh great, so now we're gonna have morons driving down the road, trying to keep their car on the road while using their cellphone to play a game, where they try to keep their car the on road.
Choose yer poison: Prophets or Profits
The tilting technique can also be used to sweep large virtual pages across the phone's screen
Why did an Etch-a-sketch spring to mind when I read that?
"If you have a game involving keeping a car on the road..."
could they make it easier?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
It looks like your plane is crashing. Would you like to call someone and make a dying utterance?
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
true enough. I mis-typed. Please accept my apologies regarding you're comment....
DAMN! I did it again.
Have you ever been on a train or in any other type of vehicle? They move! Sometimes not very smoothly.
What's to stop the phone from sensing every pothole in the road or expansion joint in the train tracks as user input?
This really seems useless in a real-world application.
Putting moderation advice in your
that's all really..
why bother...I've yet to find any decent games that I wanted to play on my 2' phone screeen thanks.....Heck I can barely use that miniscule screeen to dial much less play a video game....
So much technology, so many idiots, and still the kids starve in the streets.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
and better too.
they have had -solid state- tilt sensors for a while, in fact they had them in Palms with this nifty tilt game that was like those old marble puzzles.
well technicaly, they dident have them in palms, it envolved opening the palm and soldering the sensor in, tho there was a dongle version in development like, four, five years ago...
...I got nothing.
Thats funny.. "Keep the car on the road by tilting the phone", how about putting the damn phone down and keeping your car on the road by using the steering wheel instead of chatting about what jimmy said to janey, or playing tilting games...
meh
To reboot the phone, hold in over your head and shake it back and forth???
--D
This may be true but it's close to meaningless when it comes to the market and quality of coverage. The great debate over CDMA/TDMA/whatever is fun for telco engineers but the public wants to know only:
1. does it work in my area?
2. is it reasonably reliable?
3. is it economical?
And most of the mobile networks in the USA fail on these grounds for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with technology. I remember trying to use my GSM in the States, frustrated to find that outside the airports and a few major cities, nothing worked.
Mobile telecoms in the US are handicapped by the regulations surrounding fixed lines: in most European countries mobile phones outstrip fixed lines because they are as cheap and much more useful. In the US, the "local calls are basically free" regulations mean mobile phones can't compete fairly.
This kind of issue is much, much more important than the relative merits of CDMA, TDMA and their variants.
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What if you're the passenger in a real car driving down a bumpy road...how do you keep the virtual car on the road then?
What if you're driving a real car down a bumpy road...how do you keep either of the cars on the road then?
[Happosai]From Antic Magazine (December 1982):
Until recently, no really satisfactory substitute for the Atari joystick has been available. The first alternative was "Le Stick" from DataSoft. Billed as a onehanded joystick, it has internal mercury switches which detect the angle at which it is being held. The "fire" button is mounted on top. Some people like Le Stick, but most find that it is very hard to keep the stick perfectly upright, a position often needed to keep the cursor from moving. A squeezetrigger in Le Stick is supposed to freeze the cursor, but my hand gets tired and it is hard to adjust to the joystick action. Also, the uncertainty of directional response makes this stick unsuitable for very fast action games. Datasoft. $39.95 (1982 dollars.)
Now, if you can stand to look at this, uh, unusually shaped creation, here it is.
Why do I have a feeling one of the trolls is going to enjoy this post?
Great... now we can have crappy control mechanisms on our cell phones. To wit:
"I love the powerglove... it's so bad!"
What about CRL's "Rock n' Scroll" interface?
"If you have a game involving keeping a car on the road, you do that by tilting," says company spokesman Jan Ahrenbring.
It's hard enough to keep my car on the road while blathering on the cellphone, but now I have to tilt, too?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The Itsy (Linux pre-cursor to the IPaq) had an accelerometer hooked to the UI. You could "flip" pages with a flick of the wrist etc.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If it's a gyro, then the killer application would be as an inertial reference for aircraft navigation. The AH (artificial horizon) in light airplanes is usually a vacuum-powered mechanical device, which is expensive (precision mechanical device, no way you can get a new one for around a hundred dollars) and fragile/inconvenient (needs vacuum source, filtered air etc.) Electric gyros are available, but even more expensive. A no-moving-parts attitude reference -- like the ring laser "gyro" systems that airliners use, but cheap -- is the holy grail.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
Does this remind anyone of "Kirby's Tilt and Tumble"? It was a Game Boy game where you tilted the entire system to move Kirby, and flicked the system up to jump. Very cool.
I agree with some of the others here. How about a useful feature for once? I don't want games. I don't want web browsing. I don't want text messaging. I don't want 50 ring tones I don't want it to frigging glow blue. I want to be able to run down the street, habe it fall onto the concrete, and not shatter like a delicate glass figurine. I want it to work inside, underground, and in my car. I want a volume that goves above 'soft whisper'. I want a vibration function that is actually strong enough to sense. I want a ringer that I can hear in a crowded toom. I do not need it to weigh less than a peice of paper. a 1-lb phone is perfectly acceptable. Who needs it to be lighter than that? Who cannot carry 1 lb around?
Take a look at here where they have a "build your own solution" for tilting Palms
LOL, I didn't see the 'l' either.
It summoned up images of Motorola and Gainax forming a partnership, let me tell you.
On the whole, I don't think that would be a bad thing.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
If you hold the phone upside down and shake it, it erases the phone's memory.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
So, if your car rolls over the cell phone will shut off automatically?
I recall developed countries used to stop the sale of Gyro or gyro fluid to developing countries, suspecting, they might use the gyros to make ICBMs. Satellite launch and ICBMs are not treated differently when it comes to embargo. and look at it today, Segaway HT has a gyro, even some kiddy toys have gyros, may be not high quality, but still. Today Developed countries are controlling the Nuke technology, I hope it doesnot, go the same way.
Ding!
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