Slashdot Mirror
Sloshing Cellphones Reveal Their Contents
holy_calamity writes "UK researchers have developed software that represents a handset's battery life by using a phone's speaker and vibrator to make a device feel and sound like it contains liquid. You give it a shake to find out how much is left. The same technique can be used to represent new messages by simulating balls rattling around inside a box. It runs on recent Nokias with accelerometers; video from the researchers explains it well." What a bizarrely fun idea.
Even the best battery "life" indicators I've ever seen mostly suck. If this one uses the dropoff in voltage as a detection device like every other one has for the last brazillion years, it'll basically be completely full for the life of the charge, and about 10 minutes before it tanks, if you're lucky, you'll get the joy of the sensation of a sloshing, albeit mostly empty sloshing, in your digital device.
Now, as for the detecting how many messages there are by simulating the sound of balls rattling around in a box, it's kind of cute, as long as they're not my balls. Again, though, if you already have the device out, why not put a little numeric in the display? Huh?
It's not as if the cell phone's contents are in any way being divulged... but rather a qualitative indication of battery life.
Ok... that should've read "Bad Summary Line" as a title...
More proof that just previewing a post isn't enough. I have to be awake too!
It sounds fun, but I don't understand how shaking a phone is functionally superior to simply looking at the screen to gauge battery life or messages. Not to mention shaking your expensive mobile device around may not be the smartest idea. Flying wiimotes, anyone?
Needs more cowbell...!
No sig today...
Also, getting sloshed while on your cell phone will better allow you to divulge your contents to anyone unlucky enough to be in your address book.
Is like a cow without an altimeter.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I think this is a good idea -- harnessing already honed human perceptions and using them to relieve some of the bandwidth hogging our visual senses are subjected to. It could be quite intuitive, and save valuable screen real estate.
On the other hand, I guess it means we can't take our mobile phones on airplanes anymore, can we?
Homeland Security Agent: "How much liquid is in that phone?"
You: "None. It's virtual liquid."
Homeland Security Agent: "It sounds like at least a few ounces."
You: "Virtual liquids have neither volume nor weight."
Homeland Security Agent: "Do I look stupid to you?"
You: "Can I take the fifth on that?"
Homeland Security Agent: "That's Mistake Number Two, bub. Quoting from documents concerning the governance or liberties of American citizens is suspicious activity Level Blue. Ever heard of Ron Paul?"
You: "Uh, sure."
Homeland Security Agent: "You're under arrest."
These stories are free but worth money.
How much faster the battery runs out with this feature. Its always annoyed me that my phone beeps every min when the battery becomes low. I thought the idea was when the phone starts to run out of power to conserve it to make it last long enough till you could charge it next. Considering how much faster my phone dies with the sound on and beep compaired to when I have the sound off and low bat, i wonder how much juice it takes to shake the thing to check the bat level.
I understand frustration with cellphones, but why is it that every new method of doing something with them seems like it's going to involve shaking them?
"The same technique can be used to represent new messages by simulating balls rattling around inside a box."
I can't wait for this. I'll shake my cell phone, and someone will ask me WTF I'm doing. I'll proudly be able to proclaim, "My cell phone has balls!"
Does it make phone calls?
I have nothing to say.
It's also proof that Slashdot can drive one bats.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
that it would use the speaker and vibrator, which drain the battery, to indicate battery life.
I love cool little gimmicky inventions like this.
Unfortunately, it seems to be a solution that was applied to a problem that didn't need solving.
Now, perhaps if they linked the sloshing behavior to the amount of milk left in the carton as reported via my networked refrigerator, they'd have me interested.
... will surely find a way to either a) cripple something like this or b) charge for it. Or worse, do their standard bass-ackwards job of crippling it, like they manage to do with every other firmware and interface they "design" (and I use that term loosely) so it's constantly sloshing and having balls bounce around inside of it.
"simulating balls rattling around inside a box"
That line makes me laugh for some reason. I know, I know. Immature Slashdotter, blah, blah, blah...
I guess this puts a new spin on the colloquialism of how much "juice" is left in a battery.
When I'm concerned the battery's low, I'll be SO glad that checking it takes more power than before... Rather than peaking at an LCD number, it'll use more power making sound and vibrating! And it will make more noise than it ever did before - silence really gives me the creeps.
Progress, isn't it great!
This would kill battery life of a device, cellphones are already at only few days of usage. Lets just add a gimmicky effect that needs more battery. 'Oh how much do I have battery left? *shake* None, anymore anyways...'
no gadgets required. nor does one need to shake/rattle them to find out what's inside. just look in their eyes
Thanks to the mini-USB connector on my phone, battery life is completely not important to me. In the car, I charge my phone. At work or at a client's, I plug it into a laptop or PC. If I am desperate, I have a little USB hand crank that can power my phone for 20 minutes with about 3 minutes of cranking.
When cell phones had proprietary connectors that changed with each new model, battery life was maybe #3 on my list of important features. Now I don't even think of it. I can not recall a day in the past year when I had less than 60% battery life (even with WiFi and Bluetooth enabled on my HTC Trinity).
Is it really a big deal for a lot of people? Where are you that you can't plug in, even if just for 10-15 minutes to top off your battery?
Sorry, didn't RTFA, but did they patent this cute idea? It sounds like fun, something that I might want on my cellphone even. Willing to pay for it, but as a developer for a large cellphone component maker I could probably create this application myself. If the idea is patented, and from what I have heard from patent lawyers this sounds rather patentable, it would prevent a quick and widespread adoption. The biggest problem is that though the idea is innovative, it is hardly remarkable. It falls into the category of "we thought of it first", rather then "we spend a huge budget on research to come up with this innovation for which we need some exclusive time in the market to recoup our cost and make a reasonable profit".
How much battery power is consumed in producing the sloshing noise to tell me how much battery power is left? And if you have unread messages while checking the battery power will you get balls sloshing around in the liquid? And would the smaller messages float?
While this is very cool, it does bring up a pet peeve of mine: why can't devices show accurate battery life?
Currently, all battery charge indicators are wildly nonlinear and grossly inaccurate.
To be more specific. Conceptually, imagine a device that holds three small batteries instead of one large one, and drains them in succession one after the other. The battery life measurement on each battery would be somewhat imprecise, but when you'd exhausted the first battery you'd know that you really had 2/3 of the charge left; when you'd exhausted the second, you'd know that you really had 1/3 left.
Alternatively, how about a device that holds two smaller batteries and double-buffers them; that is, draws from one battery until it's exhausted, then draws from the second while allowing you to replace the first?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I can just see her filling her mobile phone full of water when 'the liquid has run out'.
Most of our computer humor comes from people trying to apply inappropriate models to understanding the way computers work, thinking they're like cars or household appliances. I've had people ask me if computers need tune-ups, belts changed, etc. And us techs can be dicks about it, too. "Yeah, you dropped that CD and now all the bits shifted to one side. It's going to be unbalanced, like a washing machine. So what you need to do is shake the CD until all the bits get evenly distributed."
Shaking the battery to hear how "full" it is, it's an intuitive approach for someone who knows nothing about technology and makes the geeks laugh, but here they go and make it work. Very, very funny. But this is the sort of thinking that helps make the toys easier to use. More power to 'em.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Can we get a cellphone + breathalyser combo that makes sloshing sounds if you try to talk drunk?
Even better if it's part of your OnStar(TM) system, it can shut off your ignition and call a cab for you.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I have to imagine that any blind user of a cell phone would think this is awesome. No longer do you have to wade through some exchange with a computer to figure out if you have messages; you just shake your cell phone. And figuring out your charge without any need for visual interaction must be useful, too.
Additionally, though, I don't think there is all that much problem with shaking solid-state electronics. The 'Wiimote syndrome' isn't at issue, because you're not trying to control cartoon characters on the screen - and shaking a rattle, say, is a far more sedate activity than swinging a hammer. Unless you're way, way hyper-aggressive.
[Ego]out
Add in small magnets + coils (or reverse run the accelerometer if it's suitable) and charge the phone from the shaking?
:-) [runs for cover]
It's not as if the Slashdot crowd have atrophied wrist muscles after all
This thing is awesome: after shaking my phone and causing the vibrator to work for 10 minutes, I know my battery's depleted!
This space up for sale.
Now why couldn't they get the shaking to CHARGE the battery? After all they can do that with flashlights.
My sister-in-law is legally blind and she is always asking how much battery life is left on her phone and how many messages she has. From an accessibility perspective, I think it's a pretty neat idea. Otherwise, it's a useless feature.
Actually, some of the 3rd. party "unauthorized" apps for hacked iPhones make really clever use of the accelerometer.
The most recent one was an electronic level. It draws the little bubble level on the phone's display, and the bubble moves just like a real level, indicating the phone sitting level when the bubble is between the 2 lines. It works pretty well, and given the shape of the iPhone (not likely to be attached to some sort of belt clip or holster that prevents it from lying flat on a surface), it's a practical application for it too.
I also saw someone's experimental pedometer application. Not sure it's perfectly accurate, but seems to make a pretty good attempt at counting your steps as you walk or jog. (Yeah, Nokia did this first - but it's just worth noting they're doing it for iPhones now too.)
The little drawing applet for iPhones someone wrote is funny too. If you shake the phone, it erases the current drawing, sort of like an etch-a-sketch tablet.
I agree that shaking one's phone is probably not such a "practical" or "more efficient" way of working with it. It's done more for the "cute" or "cool" factor of it. But I like some of the other things the accelerometers make possible, like the iPhone's automatic screen orientation change when it sense you flipped it sideways.
Just what we need, more people in movie theaters jerking their phones around with the sound of balls rolling around.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
...using the accelerometers and the vibrator to get a reading on battery life ends up reducing the battery life each time you shake that phone. Kinda like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. So you're going to be walking around with a huge dilemma of whether to find out how much battery is left, or to shut the heck up and not make it even worse.
Will it make a "SPLAT" sound, when I hurl the stupid thing against a wall?
This *is* a shameless plug, which is more or less on-topic here. You have been warned :-).
:-) //Johan
http://www.nongnu.org/bubblemon/
The Bubbling Load Monitor (or "Bubblemon" for short) is a system CPU and memory load monitor. It displays something that looks like a vial containing water. The water level indicates how much memory is in use. The color of the liquid indicates how much swap space is used (watery blue means none and angry red means all). The system CPU load is indicated by bubbles floating up through the liquid; lots of bubbles means high CPU load. If you have unread mail, a message in a bottle falls into the water.
A screenshot doesn't do the applet much justice, since part of its coolness is its physics engine, making the bubbles move and the surface ripple.
It's a GNOME applet, try "apt-get install bubblemon" on your favorite Debian derivative. There are also some forks which also have bubble related names.
Have fun
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Yet another way to annoy your office mates and everyone at the movie theatre.
Reminds me of the "internet is full" cartoon from Dilbert.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
Just one more thing they won't let you do, even if the phone has this feature on any other network.
You just need to add a correction factor. Every time the device actually reaches the cutoff voltage, take the raw output from the integrator and store that as the normalization constant.
Divide by the constant and you should get a pretty good (though over) estimate of the fraction used. If you want to go "really" complicated, you could multiply the correction factor by a correction factor based on how recently it was last updated, to account for the possibility of accelerating degradation. And even more complicated, the correction factors themselves would make a pretty good indicator of when the battery should be replaced instead of recharged.
I'm assuming you're doing the integration in software or digital IC, of course, since a variable normalization factor would be difficult to store for any significant length of time in an analog circuit.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
http://www.keychains4you.com/ceflca.html
Mine contains bourbon.
... does it contain more than 3oz of liquid? (Virtually speaking...)
8==8 Bones 8==8
Maybe some sort of submarine-style ballast tanks, but with helium?
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
cycle usage order
BtaF sounds off hilariously on this issue.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Just add 9 volt battery terminals to the outside of the phone that are connected directly to the battery. To check the charge simply apply your tongue to the terminals. Isn't that how everybody checks a 9 volt battery?
No software update or accelerometer required.
All the derision about it being 'cute but pointless' aside, I think it is a really novel approach, and a step in the right direction for portable device UI development. It really seeks to take advantage of the way our brains process everyday physical stimuli and apply it to processing simple bits of information from our phones.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
that's really cool - but does it have to be on such a big device? what happened to things getting smaller as technology develops? it seems phones and laptops have gone into reverse with larger screens.
Why UNIX?
Also make sure to show this feature to any TSA agents when you check into the airport. They'll be very impressed! ;)
Na, 'sall good, he was contracting "Nokianally retentive moronic-menu-laden celephony devices".
...is that this is how human beings spent the vast majority of their evolution checking how much of something is left.
You'd hold it, feel it, shake it, or at least eyeball it in three dimensions.
Any way of making our experience of how much power is left more like the way we did it for most of our history is just naturally appealing to human beings.
It's not that it's more "functional" in some sense that is detached from our simple, arbitrary preferences -- it's functional in the sense that the purpose technology is to make us happy, and being able to feel a quantity of something, for no particularly "good" reason, makes people happy because it's familiar.
Any of the other benefits are just gravy. I could definitely see this catching on if this effect can be implemented in a way which feels natural (literally) and is affordable.
The effect shouldn't require active shaking of the object, even -- you should be able to feel the weight constantly, and the shifting of the weight should be evident anytime the phone is moving or has just stopped moving.
There is no way in which such a feature wouldn't be superior to a solely visual mechanism, and it would just feel good.
Scottish researchers at a Scottish university......uk..PAH!
I don't think the point is to find "The One True Solution". There is no such thing. There are many, many ways to do things, and if you can find some use for a thing chances are you can build on it. Personally - though I may be a bit OCD about such things - I find the 'slowing' distortion of noises to be grating, like nails on a chalkboard. And, contrariwise, I love tactile feedback. But I could see how others would want it other ways.
[Ego]out