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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 :-)"
Some very cool videos available
Heh. Not anymore, they aren't.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
Like the Camera phone itself, this is a solution to a problem I never knew existed.
Unknown host pong.
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.
Why integrate a cell phone with all these add on features that aren't nearly as good as things devoted specifically to the task? Cameras on cell phones are horrible compared to a decent digital camera, cell phone games are also quite lame (though, in Japan, you can get some nice looking versions of Dragonquest 1 and FF1), and now this... Why not just fix certain problems with the PHONING (i.e. bad signals) - the main capability for which they were developed, rather than adding a whole number of (useless) features?
pretty underwhelming that something described as a "virtual mouse and keyboard" turns out to be more like "virtual touchscreen, as long as you don't have more than a few options you want touchable."
Sorry but first off, I don't want a camera phone. Second, Will this all run within my 2 second attention span? Most likely just targeted ads anyways. Not to mention what this would do to the phone's battery life.
Since the main site is predictably a bit bogged down, there is also a page at the University of Cambridge Systems Research Group detailing the research side of things. It also has some cool videos :-)
If a site is unreachable within the first 10 posts the story gets yanked. Delete it like it never happened. Seriously, how the hell are we supposed to have a discussion about something we can't even read about?
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
what else can we turn cell phone in to ? i'd like to have web server and ssh installed on it too, wash the dishes, flashlight, what else ? :-)
Yes, that's the way I like to be clicked.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
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
...when we show you how to take pictures of your family using an optical mouse!
Actually, this is pretty cool - nice idea. No need to carry around a mouse for your laptop (if you hate the touchpad), just use your cellphone! Simple and smart.
Eliminate beer Goggles! Picture the scene: you're at a bar, gettin' close to closing time. The chick you've been talking to is lookin' pretty good, but all your friend's have abandoned you.
Whip out the phone, take a pic of the broad. Phone flashes green if she's good, Red if she's not.
That would have saved me uh...i mean...yeah...
Most folk'll never lose a toe, and then again some folk'll...
a multimeter...
lots of times I needed a damn multimeter and I looket to the cell phone and imagined it could have a pair of probes...
at least a AC/DC voltmeter up to 300V...
If anyone has been to Seattle's Experience Music Project (assuming the outside appearence didn't scare you away), this could be used as a replacement for the MEG devices that they provide. I could see using this to point at an exhibit and getting bluetooth audio streamed to your phone. Might be useful for museums that don't have Paul Allen's deep pockets.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
You wouldnt believe my face when i saw this story.. I've been mouseless for some time now (I'm sure a /.er can help me - details below), this was a god send.. then the site gets slashdotted - im not so happy
then i see some mirrors - im happy again
then i find it wont work with my phone - im pissed.
Anyway, I have two mice (1 USB and 1 PS2), yet neither work (the cursor will not move and clicking has no effect). Windows says the drivers are fine, it's not a virus.. i've been told it might be the motherboard, can anyone verify this?
The mouse was jumping a little a few days before breaking, then the day before it broke it was stopping and starting. The day it broke.. well, it broke. Right in the middle of making the GUI for a program.
WHY ARE MOUSEKEYS SO DAMN SLOW?!?
Dont have a phone call while your using your new mouse. Sure let me see whats playing tonight. One second (scruffing sound) Sorry about the but my phone is also my mouse.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
Story is about HighEnergyMagic, for which WHOIS tells me:Story is mirrored at University of Cambridge Systems Research Group, where we find that the page is "© 2004 Anil Madhavapeddy".
Seriously, shouldn't the submitter put some sort of a disclaimer somewhere? Or failing which, at least pay Slashdot to run these "ads", dammit! :)
I haven't RTFA (./:ed), but these guys have potentially made a great piece of software for the physically impaired. Strap a webcam to the side of your head: Voila, no need to use hand to maneuver a mouse.
Does everything include nothing?
Now how will you (pretend to) listen to your gf/boss when ur actually surfing ;)
Striving to be common....
Striving to be common...
That's the same line the Mormons use to justify polygamy.
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
I installed the app on my P900 (28kb), but when I try to run it I just get a "Folder Not Found" error. And now when I try to uninstall it, I get a "There is insufficient memory available for the specified installation." This after a phone reboot. Ah, Symbian...
There is no gravity...the earth just sucks.
Ok maybe im pointing out the stupidly obvious but.. bluetooth (or even just normal phone/wap) is TWO WAY! why would you need a camera phone with ugly spots all over your poster/screen!? just press cursor keys on your phone and send that over blue-tooth (like a dvd menu interface)?
What would be totally totally neat would be a dumb-terminal standard using bluetooth so when you walked into say an airport and launched the 'dumb-terminal' app on your phone you would get a screen produced by the airport computer which would be able to tell you exactly where you were (triangulation or bluetooth 'cells') on a visual map. Then you could just tap in the 'customer code' on your ticket and the airport computer would be able to tell you the real time of your flight, delays, where you should go, how much time you had, where you could get discount booze etc etc. the same could work for libraries, train/bus stations, sports-games, malls, towns, tourist attractions, and of course cinemas (where the screen would say "turn your fucking phone off" just before the film started) the protocal could either be like wap/html or pushed by the server, whatever aslong as its a standard, its open, it supports funky graphics, sound and vide and you dont get charged for it.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
They've already put their domain up for sale!
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Why you would want to put a webserver on your phone is beyond me though, the bandwidth technology is still a long way from usable for this kind of thing. Maybe in the future though, but still... what do you want to serve? A live stream from your phone that sitting in your pocket? Wow... a dark screen... that would be cool to watch.
Sure there would be some use for this (live webcast from a convention for instance) but it's more a brag thing than something useful as opposed to an SSH client.The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Sailing Clicker does just this. I'm using a 12" Powerbook with built in bluetooth and a Sony Ericson T68i. I can controll the mouse movements with the joystick on the phone.
Microsoft Windows runs on stress and frustration.
Carriers generally LOSE money on the phones. A phone with more whiz-bang features is a more expensive phone they have to subsidize. Carriers make money off of charges for using the network. The reason all the carriers are promoting picture phones is because they're hoping you decide to use your fancy new picture phone to send and recieve pictures over the cellular network, which they can charge extra for. That's the same reason they were heavily promoting downloadable ringtones and games last year. All carriers make money off of is your use of the network. The phones are just a nuisance from a carrier's point of view.
Like what? What device, specifically, will perform the task these guys are describing? Are you going to build a completely new device with a camera, mouse buttons, and wireless connectivity for people to carry around so they can use these interactive installations?
Doesn't it make more sense just to install some software, which is practically free, on a device which already has all the necessary hardware?
Doesn't it make sense, if there are a lot of applications which require the same hardware, to just build one damn device and use it for all of them? If you really need a better implementation of one specific application than this convergence device can provide, carry a specialized device when you need it, as well. That still beats carrying a bag full of devices around all the time, when on any given day at least half of them are expensive and complete overkill.
But with cameras and processing power on cell phones getting more sophisticated, other 2d barcode like QR Code or semacode will eventually outpace this technology with their considerably larger data capacity (up to as many as 4000 alphanumeric characters). In fact, semacode is already demonstrated on Series 60 implementations.
The submitter points to an application that uses spotcodes for remote control. In that implmentation, the spotcode translates to a number which the program then uses to send an instruction over Bluetooth.
However, those wishing to skip the tedium of entering URLs from the keypad using Spotcodes should note that BangoSpot (using the Spotcode technology) almost certainly uses a middleware server which performs a Spotcode number-to-URL lookup. So someone will know that you're using the Spotcodes. It's sort of like the CueCat but the implementation _requires_ them to know what you're looking up in order to provide a WAP URL.
It's an interesting approach, but I wonder how fast cellular carriers can adopt Spotcode-to-URL servers in their network before phone technology ends up leapfrogging and reading and entering sophisticated 2d barcode data directly into a phone browser.