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PowerBook As A New Kind Of Human Interface Device
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?"
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.
This article is fake. Note the following lie in bold:
"Before this my girlfriend (who uses a Dell notebook) has never called anything computer related "jawdropping"! "
This Porn Site is Powerbook Enabled ..yes, I can see a lot of new ways of interaction
and Apples new Powerbook tagline:
"Shake it Like A Polaroid Picture"
or
"Do the Powerbook Shuffle"
Thinkpads have this sensor too...
"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results" - Winston Churchill
How much good all this tilting and stuff does the hard drive. I'd think it caused some undue wear and tear, if not a head crash. Plus, to be picking up the whole laptop for use as an interface device seems a bit risky. Especially a Powerbook (you're talking around 2 grand there, Slim.)
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
And how much worse does this torque the bearings of the fast-spinning, gyroscopically-simulating hard drive?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Umm, actually, she was just yawning.
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
I don't think this is a particularly good application for racing games, because if you watch the video, since you're actually tilting the notebook, the screen tilts with it. It's somewhat disorienting, and requires you to tilt your head repeatedly (as you turn) which will quite likly get annoying real fast.
Enjoy an e-piphany
Depending on how you have your power settings, the HD is probably going to be asleep most of the time anyway. And the gentle motion you're talking about here is hardly going to be enough to phase a laptop drive - I've got a portable storage device that uses a laptop drive and had it sucessfully write a whole GB of data while I was walking quickly and had it in a pocket in my shorts.
In short, don't worry about the HD... slippery fingers might be a bit more of a concern but just be careful to do this above your lap, not held high in the air like a trophy.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
daveschroeder discovered to be the username for Amit Singh at Slashdot.org
There are 2 kinds of people in this world. Those that can keep their train of thought,
It's an accellerometer! There have been inertial mice based off these guys for as long as the sensors have been available.
h tm l
There's some projects out there to hack one of these into some earlier palmpilots directly onto the bus, a nifty hack. Oh, wait, starting to get that feeling..
http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/30/1546247.s
Sigh. I have a powerbook and like it, but new kind of HID? Please.
Call me when they have a camera in there like the Sony vaio picturebook used to, and you can wave your arms at it and such. Then it might be a new interface device.
..don't panic
Well, no.
Don't get me wrong, this is a cool hack, but a 17" powerbook weighs over 3 kilograms.
You know how your Xbox controller was a bit big? Well, it wasn't that big.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
After (of course) parking the disk heads, I think that turning the laptop upside-down and giving it a good shaking should clear the screen.
I mean, wouldn't that just be common sense?
Other laptops may have had this for years...
So where are the Windows apps that make use of this sensor?
Apple doesn't even deserve credit for this one as they include the sensor for the same reason everyone else does. Apple does deserve a little credit for making the output of this sesnor accessible to the programmer, and then the guy that developed the initial software to make use of it deserves the lions share of the credit for saying "hey, what if I did this!".
In your rush to discredit Apple, you were a bit too hasty in dismissing the accomplishments of the programmer as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
is that most geeks would then have equal size arms.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"Laptops are big...Mice are small...add a motion sensor to a blue-tooth mouse and you will drop my jaw."
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
...anything that doesn't plug into the back of your neck just plain sucks!!
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Zapp Brannigan: Kif, clear my schedule.
Kif turns the Etch-a-Sketch upside-down and shakes it.
Yes with both you could bludgeon someone to death , however with the powerbook you could bludgeon in style whilst running OS X and with the sensor you would risk less HDD dammage whilst doing it
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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! ...Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sensor be standard issue in all future laptops?"
I tried it with John Madden's NFL Football. I threw a Hail Mary pass; a perfect, aim-for-the-end-zone spiral. My Powerbook sailed out the window of my 10th floor San Francisco apartment and I haven't seen it since.
I wonder if the pass was complete?
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
Consider tilting your laptop all over the place on an airplane. I''m sure it would annoy your neighbors to no end.
Actually, tilting the laptop didn't annoy my neighbors nearly as much as the airplane sounds I made, or when I'd headbutt the guy sitting next to me when I'd tilt my head along with the laptop.
The stewardess took my laptop away half way through the trip. Something about homeland security...
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
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
I can see the powerbook/ibook sensors becoming popular amoungst laptop music geeks as a controller for interactive performances. (making the computer more and more like an instrument that can be played live)
Do you really want to be tilting a PowerBook around when you've only got one hand free?
Hate to sound like a phone geek, but my new Nokia 3220 with this standard mod has this feature, supported by 'Java motion' for programming, and ships games that use it...
...was at Siggraph in Orlando, FL in 1998. One booth had goggles (not sure what else to call them, kind of like these) and a headband with a gyro-sensor-thingie. Even though it wasn't 3d/stereo (the only possible improvement), it was so awesome. They had a good FPS game running (I think either GLQuake or Quake II at the time) and it was the greatest thing in the world. Just as good as you can imagine--walk with the arrow keys on a keyboard, shoot with 'control', but you could look around with your head, rather than the mouse.
It worked perfectly. Just what VR should be. Better than the those big, clunky, slow things at the mall; probably as good as what was imagined by Gibson. Better than what was shown in that crappy movie with Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, based on the equally crappy Crichton book. Perfect, perfect, perfect--very fast, no delay at all, nothing unnatural about it. Just turn your head, look up, and that's what you see. Exactly what you would expect.
My question is this: it's six and a half years later. Gear like this should be a few hundred bucks now. Why isn't it everywhere? Sony quit making the glasstrons, and this place has gyros be they seem like they cost a lot more than they should. I don't know a gamer who wouldn't love a setup like this. Gamers have spent a zillion dollars on video cards and controllers in the last decade. Stuff like this seems like it would have a huge market, and capitalism--more than nature itself--abhors a vacuum.
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Wow this is perhaps the most genius post ever, why didn't we think of just doing it properly first instead of spending decades improving technology step by step???
Surely your revelation will usher in a new era of computing. Hell before this we hadn't even been thinking thanks fsterman, thanks.
WARNING: Comment may include sarcasm in reply to a horribly naive and foolish post.