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."
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'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.
Gits.
... just tilt it vigorously against a wall.
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...
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
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
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?
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
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.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
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
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!