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PowerBook As A New Kind Of Human Interface Device

Posted by Hemos on from the interesting-applications dept.

An anonymous reader writes "As covered earlier on Slashdot, Amit Singh had shown how to access and use the motion sensor feature in the late model PowerBooks for innovative things, which created quite a buzz in the Mac community. In an ingenius new article, Singh has taken the idea all the way and released software which lets you use a PowerBook with a motion sensor as a general purpose input device which works with existing apps. IMHO the coolest use of this is for playing games: be sure to check out the video footage in the article. For instance, in a car racing game, you steer by tilting the PowerBook left and right, go faster by tilting it forward, brake by tilting it backwards! You can also scroll in apps. Google Map scrolling with my PowerBook feels like flying in an aiprlane over the terrain. I must say you have to try this in real life to appreciate the experience ... go to the Apple store or something if you don't have the hardware ;-) Before this my girlfriend (who uses a Dell notebook) has never called anything computer related "jawdropping"! Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sensor be standard issue in all future laptops?"

4 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. More from Amit Singh by daveschroeder · · Score: 5, Informative

    What's even cooler about Amit Singh is that he's a he's a researcher at IBM Alamaden Research Center, working on, among other things, secure communications and Linux on the desktop.

    And be sure to check out his other articles, particularly What is Mac OS X? . They're all well written, comprehensive on their respective topics, and generally excellent.

    1. Re:More from Amit Singh by TheGuano · · Score: 4, Informative

      The same motion sensor (with real-time 3d display of the notebook's orientation) has been on the IBM Thinkpad for a while now. Since he's an IBM researcher, maybe he'll take the time to port it over to the PC as well! I've always wanted to play Labyrinth or Marble Madness (or Super Monkey Ball) by actually tilting the machine.

  2. Also See: by jeffehobbs · · Score: 4, Informative


    This is really cool from a UI perspective, but not entirely new. A couple years ago people were doing interesting things with tilt sensors for Palm devices. Also see: Nintendo's new WarioWare game for GameBoy advance, which has a rotational sensor built-in to the cartridge. Also, Sony has done research in this area as well.

    ~jeff

  3. Re:Thinkpads hmmmm by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    On Thinkpads the sensor is on the hard drive itself. The difference is that in PowerBooks it is on the motherboard, allowing it to be used with any hard drive and technically any hardware - e.g. Sudden Motion Sensing iPods...