New Japanese Mobile Phones Detect Motion

GreenTea writes "Some of the latest mobile phones in Japan come with motion sensors that let users detect motion or play action games like those on the Nintendo Wii console. The D904i from NTT DoCoMo, Japan's top mobile carrier, contains a tiny motion sensor that detects shaking and tilting, company spokesman Nobuyuki Hatanaka said. 'The software supports three main types of motion: shake, rock and roll. Shake can be used for actions such as rolling dice and shuffling MP3 decks. Rock interprets right, left, up and down gestures to generate traditional cursor-style user input commands. Roll offers joystick control by responding to tilting motions used in navigating games, maps or Web pages.'"

Comments

Jesus

[Anonymous Coward]

"Some of the latest mobile phones in Japan come with motion sensors that let users detect motion or play action games like those on the Nintendo Wii console."

Who writes this shit? Did the writer actually spend two seconds imagining a player swinging the cell phone like a tennis racket or golf club? And the player is watching the tiny screen that most phones have, while he is swinging it?

Put down the crack pipe and repeat after me: this motion sensing phone will NOT play games like those on the Nintendo Wii. It may allow you to play Q-Bert or some other outdated game, but is nowhere close to the innovation offered by the Wii controller.

It would be a nice safety feature....

[ptbarnett]

Maybe they can program the phone to detect when the user is driving a vehicle and disable the phone.

Re:It would be a nice safety feature....

[guruevi]

Maybe there is another reason for it. As I see in your graph, the rates have been dropping while drunk driving seems to have gone up (the morality of people has gone down, new types of drugs, new type of parties, people mixing drugs and alcohol and a more expanded use of it).

Maybe drunk driving is not the main culprit of traffic fatalities. Of course, you tend to hear more about accidents with drunk people involved than other fatal accidents and that's just the media where it's not as interesting to report that 2 people were just not watching out than a sensational story where one was drunk/drugged.

It's still not safe driving around drunk since in case you have to react fast, you don't which could make the accident more severe. I think it also has to do that if you're drunk and in an accident, due to the alcohol, you might get into shock faster and your body doesn't react as well or reverse to the drugs and medical help applied to you in the initial emergency procedures.

Accidents are usually caused by 2 persons, both might not be watching out as well, the one because he is drunk, the other because he's on the phone or thinking/talking about something else. But if both persons were on the same road, and not drunk, the accident might have happened as well, because both were thinking or not watching out enough, just as severe. It's just easier to blame an accident on the alcohol which is an obvious indicator, just as it's easier to blame disappearing bees on cell phones instead of fungi

I have driven around once while I was drunk. I knew I was drunk and adjusted my driving style accordingly and made it a very short trip because I was scared as hell. On another occasion, I knew I was over the limit but I was not impaired, still, I heightened my senses, turned off the radio etc. to make sure I wasn't missing anything on the road that could cause an accident.

Again, I do not endorse drunk or impaired driving since you'll lose the concentration but saying it is the CAUSE of an accident is silly. Radio's and CD-players are just as good a cause of accidents as drunk driving or cell phones. Should we ban all CD-players now too? A family member of mine was in a severe accident because he was messing around with the CD-player and talking to friends in the car, his crash even appeared in the local paper and tv-newscasts because his car was total-loss but it wasn't blamed on the CD-player, it was blamed on them coming back from a party (and he was the designated driver, so he didn't have any alcohol in him according to the police report).

Motion-sensitive phones are old news in Japan

[rh2600]

My Vodafone/SoftBank v603sh had this over a year ago, and it was a 1 yen phone! Motion Sensor for Golf and some Sega FPS, Microphone for Singstar Clone, Analog TV/FM with flip screen for widescreen, 2MP camera with Optical Zoom...ahhh loved that little phone.. pity I moved back to NZ ;) You could even record off TV to the SD card on the phone - it supported EPG over data so it had Tivo-esque functionality! http://mb.softbank.jp/mb/product/2G/model/v_603sh/

This is a bad hack

[Anonymous Coward]

This stuff is complete crud. If the editors did any work (yeah that's you Zonk) then they would have linked to some actual information on the technology. Have a looky here:

http://www.gesturetekmobile.com/inside.html

They use the camera in your phone to detect motion. The same idea as an optical mouse. The problem with this is the camera uses a hell of a lot of power while taking photos normally. - From 0.5 to 2Watts peak according to EETimes : http://www.eetimes.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessioni d=0?articleID=12804124
So using this gesture recognition will run down your battery something crazy.

It also relies on being able to track movements through the camera. So if your hand obscures the camera, or you're not pointing your phone at something steady then this thing will not work at all. Sure even somebody walking in front of you from left to right might cause the gesture recognition to move left.

So, all in all I think this is a terrible terrible hack. If they can get it working then more power to them. But for gods sake, if you want gesture recognition just use an accellerometer. The complaints about high prices are simply because there isn't any massive market yet. When accelerometers start being included in phones, economies of scale will bring the price down.

-Vince