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Use Your Cellphone as a 3D Mouse
Roland Piquepaille writes "In recent years, we've started to use our cellphones not only for placing calls or exchanging messages. Now, we take pictures, read our e-mails, listen to music or watch TV. But, according to New Scientist, UK researchers are going further with a prototype software that turns your cellphone into a 3-D mouse. The phone is connected to your computer via Bluetooth. And you control the image on the screen by rotating or moving your phone. As says one of the researchers, 'it feels like a much more natural way to interact and exchange data.' The technology might first be used in shopping malls to buy movie tickets or to interact with advertising displays."
So will I soon be able to have a Minority-Report-like interface for my computer?
Great, so I get to wait longer in line while each person ahead of me tries to sync up and use their bluetooth phone. This is the kind of stuff touch-screen were made for.
What we have here is a solution looking for a problem.
-Bean
Because we can!
What has changed in the three years and eight months since this story?
I have said it before, and i will say it again:
This type of interface is completely impractical, except for a few high specialized applications (like architecture).
The problem with things like this is that your arm gets tired after using it for a few minutes. The great thing about a mouse is that you can take your hand off of it and it stays in the same place. I know that personally, I use the arrow and tab keys for navigation WAY more than i use my mouse.
Mice work really really great because it is a 2D interface to a 2D environment.
I would rather see grant money pumped into multi-touch than stuff like this.....its cool, its just not going to replace your mouse anytime soon.
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I had a go at doing this a while ago using AR toolkit plus which uses AR Tags as a reference point to send the mouse data to the computer. I never really did get the camera filter working so I abandoned it. I did ask Daniel Wagner (the lead guy on artoolkit plus) for the DSVideoCE component source, which is a CE directshow filter, but he replied that it wasn't possible to release it. CE is a pain in the backside so I gave up. It worked pretty well from a video file I pre-recorded, so I reckon it would have worked well.
Pretty much everything about artoolkit plus worked out of the box, and the bluetooth code to emulate a mouse was pretty simple. if someone wants to give something like this article a bash, I would start with something like this.
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WE hear almost monthly how this or that will make it so we can buy movie tickets with our cellphones. grand experiments have been done all over the world to do this and every single one fails.
I suggest they do something different, start with forcing all financial institutions to adopt a single standard for electronic payment and force them to accept it without fees or charges.
THEN let's do the utopian buy everything with our cellphones trick. Hell it's been in place in europe in some places for almost 5 years now (German bus line, you pay your bus fare by waving your cellphone near the pay terminal)
I'm tired of the wheel being reinvented monthly while nobody is inventing roads.
Start with how to force banks to quit being assholes and create a universal OPEN electronic payment system that has ZERO cost.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Interacting with ticket machines and other public terminals? Think i'll stick to the dedicated interfaces they will continue to provide: more efficiet and more secure.
Interacting with video advertising displays? Gee, I can't wait.
Using my handset to interact with public devices will only be cool when I can stop the 07:43 train from taking off without me at Clapham Junction and when I can disable that stereo system the five punks in the Camaro Convertible have blasting my head off at the traffic lights. (Perhaps you can do this one already?)
What you want is simply to interact with your handset which will replicate the public interface/display on its screen. I.e. Multiple users simultaneously accessing a terminal display and no more queues. Little need to control the external display except as a gimmick.
"He Who Dares Wins"
If you can't wait for the 3D cellphone mouse. Here are some links to selfmade 3D mouse pointer devices. BTW: at least one of these guides has been on ./ already.
The amount of things that one can do with a cell phone is nothing short of amazing. And the end is nowhere near in sight yet: Manufacturers keep coming up with ever more creative, ingenious applications for the cell phone. Indeed, the only thing we can be positive about is that the cell phone service will remain overpriced, unreliable and limited in its coverage, while the sound quality will remain disappointingly awful. Well, at the very least we will be able to use it as a 3D mouse.
But you can't right click.
If you haven't made a developer cry, you've wasted a day.
An electronic payment system that has ZERO cost is impossible. I guess you probably mean one where retailers build the cost of it into their business and banks charge retailers rather than bank customers, but that still has a cost, just not a direct consumer cost.
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Every 3D input device created over the last 15 years has failed without exception. They were either too expensive (datagloves for VR, various space navigator gizmos for CAD), or too crappy to be of any use (P5 glove?), or died because of lack of driver/software support.
So if anyone wants to create a 3D input device that actually gets used by more than 5 people a) design it so it actually works well b) don't overprice it c) don't count on game or software companies to "support" it unless you create a really easy way for software to interface with your device.
As for cellphones being used as a 3D wand, that sounds like a marketing gimmick to me, and a stupid one at that.
"Start with how to force banks to quit being assholes and create a universal OPEN electronic payment system that has ZERO cost."
It's the perverse incentives of market economies that give rise to this kind of crap and why the banking industry needs to be regulated.
In canada Pay day loan shops (i.e. legal loan sharking) is quite the business I wish government would shut it down, these parasites do not add anything to the economy.
Does anyone else find it ironic that they want you to buy your movie tickets with your cell phone and then don't want you to bring your cell phone into the theater?
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...in gas stations when it is illegal to smoke there?
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