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."
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?
.. about a guy whose car went off the road while he was tilting his mobile trying to keep a virtual car on the road.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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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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
..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??
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.
As a guitar player, I can understand the nuances involved in motion patterns, control, differentiation of player/user, etc. But in practice, tilt control provides no real value. It requires you to change the orientation of the device to provide input, even though your primary method of feedback is dependant on the orientation of the device.
;)
Imagine if you typed into your word processor by placing your hands in the middle of the document on your screen and typing on a virtual keyboard - you can't see what you are typing until you stop, look, and then you have to fix mistakes blind as well. It just doesn't work, even though a virtual on screen keyboard has instant geek appeal.
Besides, the nuances you are talking about don't really apply to the cell phone/pda market - that is about getting information into and out of the device as quickly and accurately as possible. subtle wrist flicks and tilting are not the way to do that. I can't actually think of an application (except perhaps security/authentication) that would benefit from nuanced control in this medium. Maybe if they created a virtual theramin or something... but talk about a niche market.
If you want to spend your phone real estate on a screen, do two things:
1) Voice dialing. When done right, this is a killer feature.
2) Touch Screen. Scroll maps and such by simply placing your finger (thumb?) on the screen and "pulling" it.
the physical orientation of the device in the real world should have no bearing on the behavior of the systems software.
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.
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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"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?