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Cellphone as Virtual Mouse, Keyboard
stab writes "Check this out! High Energy Magic have announced a public beta of software to let you use your camera-phone as a physical mouse by just pointing and clicking and rotating it in the air. Some very cool videos available: check out the volume control and flight booking ones in particular! The tags used are really robust - they did a wastebasket torture test for a bit of fun as well :-)"
If the spot codes can hold a few bytes of info - wave your cell over a tattoo or a shirt someone's wearing to get their name/cellphone number ... um, never mind, that'd be a bad thing.
What wasn't reported though is that the company Gyration already has patent pending on gyroscopic mouse technology. Gyration had already released an open letter last week addressing this when the cell phone mouse was first announced.
Natural Selection: self-destruction of the poor and lazy
Didn't Motorola CEO get kicked out because that's precisely what he was saying ("concentrate on quality that's obviously suffering right now, and not race for features")?
I think in the current market there is always race for features. More, more more and more. Until some complaint gets too loud and bites the company in the ass. Then fixing it becomes a future as well ("Our dialer is now better than ever").
I found it interesting how Microsoft acted back in the day. They bloated their software with features, many many features, to beat the feature list of the competitor. Well, so what that it crashed constantly, so what that it didn't do the job that well. (sarcasm). For some reason, it's still around...
Give me a break ... where do the disclaimers stop? I mean, the software's being given away for free for non-commercial use, and I think it's of interest to other techies. Notice I didn't submit anonymously.
... I do my bit there as well. But noone cares about that stuff, so why bother talking about it instead of stuff I think is fun?
And don't start spouting "open-source this, open-source that" to me
Like the Camera phone itself, this is a solution to a problem I never knew existed.
This kind of statement about the lack of a use for a camera phone tends to tell me something about the person that says it.
1. They're not very creative. I use a camera-phone all the time for stuff I'd never use a camera for. For example, I take pictures of sales displays to compare the product on the internet when I get home and I take pictures of the sign that reminds me where I parked my car at the airport. Instant notes with no effort. I also have a cool game that lets me move around by moving my phone around. If you were more creative, you would have thought of a few more uses too.
2. They're not very spontaneous. I take pictures of my friends, family and important events far more often than I ever would if I had to carry around a full-size camera all the time. If you were interested in this kind of spontaneity then I'm sure you would see the use of a camera phone.
3. They're self-centered. People who don't want a camera phone personally, and seem to be dumbfounded by those that do, tend to be some of the most self-centered people I know. Lots of people have camera phones and lots of people like them. You may not desire or need one, but are you able to learn from and empathize with those that do? If you were interested in the thoughts and feelings of the people around you, you might have asked one of them why they bought a camera phone and realize that not everyone has the same needs and desires that you do.
Believe it or not, I'm not trying to slam you here. I'm just reporting my personal observations of people who've talked like you have about these devices. Camera phones are interesting because they're very popular, but there's a significant backlash. That backlash crowd, in my opinion, is really more alike than most people realize.
TW