Slashdot Mirror
Using Mobile Phones To Write Messages In Air
Anonymous writes "Engineering
students at Duke University have taken advantage of the accelerometers
in emerging cell phones to create an application that permits users to
write short notes in the air with their phone, and have that note
automatically sent to an e-mail address. The 'PhonePoint Pen' can be held just
like a pen, and words can be written on an imaginary whiteboard.
With this application a user could take a picture with a phone camera, and annotating it immediately with
a short caption. Duke Computer Engineering Professor Romit Roy
Choudhury said that his research group is envisioning mobile phones as
just not a communication device, but a much broader platform for social sensing and human-computer interaction. Such interactivity has also emerged in the work of other research groups, such as MIT's Sixth Sense project, Dartmouth's MetroSense project, and Microsoft Research's NeriCell project, to name a few."
Duke students discover double integrator recursive filter.
News at 11.
this does not seem to have big practical use as of now, if only for the fact that if you do not have access to a screen, for reading what you wrote or sketched, it seems to me unusable. On the other hand, if you are at your desk, the mouse does its job quite well, thank you.
Having said that, it looks like a Wiimote for everyone, and the possibilities are mind boggling. Think of Smart houses, in which by moving your mobile you can raise or lower the air conditioning and such.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Instead of using the g-sensor in the phone, put a g-sensor and a small RF unit in a small stylus.
Then you can write on a piece of paper or the table/wall while seeing the text appear on the screen of your mobile phone in the other hand.
Always interested in business ideas - eigentluk at gmail.com
"an application that permits users to write short notes in the air with their phone, and have that note automatically sent to an e-mail address."
My god! They've invented text messaging from a phone, but... worse.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Not really that original, there as an iphone app for this on the App store about a week after the app store opened. That was, what, almost a year ago?
I can always tell how clever an idea is by the amount of instant envy I feel for not having thought of it first. ;-) But seriously, for somebody like me with *large* handwriting, writing in the air would be way easier than scrawling along on a little phone screen.
I can't wait to try it out. Sure seems obvious in restrospect (another sign of a brilliant idea).
expandfairuse.org
I keep hearing that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
And, we keep getting closer and closer to having "magic wands".
In a few years we'll all be wandering around waving our hands wildly and murmuring gibberish, and yes, we will all be wizards.
Boy, I bet that would go over well in a movie theater.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Fail.
This is an app which uses the accelerometer in the iPhone and handwriting recognition to create notes on the phone itself. Nothing to do with writing letters in the air which are visible to other people.
I know this is slashdot, but you are expected to RTF'ing stub at least.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
It would probably allow Italians to have two conversations at once.
For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.
-- Douglas Adams
The story title doesn't help. I was expecting exactly that kind of functionality - some mobile phone with a large screen (like the iPhone and other touch-screen devices where the screen is most of the front of the phone) that could write in mid-air as you waved it side-to-side by using the accelerometer to determine where it was and what part it needed to display.
It'd have been a more interesting use if it was that, rather than making you wave your hand around like an idiot to show "we can get input from accelerometers and combine the values to draw lines".
From the headline I expected this to be about some persistence of vision application. Now that would be cool. Just imagine people waving their cellphones at each other.
What we need, after this, is mobile phones with screens as well!
That would be so useful....
permits users to write short notes in the air with their phone
Sort of like a touch-screen, but far more effort?
a user could take a picture with a phone camera, and annote it immediately with a short caption
Sort of like a touch-screen, but far more effort?
If only someone would invent a phone that had both an accelerometer and a touch-screen. They could make a fortune!
Novel: Check
Excellent thesis topic: Check
Accolades from fellow CS geeks: Check
Impressive on resume: Check
Realistically useful: Uncheck
Better known as 318230.
The best part is you can flip the device over when you make a mistake and pretend to pour Wite-Out®.
So the MIT sixth sense project, how does the program know what it's looking at?
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso
All the written messages will be GPS locked to the real positions they were written at.
And a new addition is glasses that can see the messages.
A whole new arena for graffiti has been opened.
Or a whole new avenue for penis spamming.
The only reason that you need to make such large gestures is because current accelerometer technology (consumer grade, at least) isn't accurate enough to pick up the changes from making smaller gestures. Once the accuracy is improved, the app shouldn't need much more tuning.
Having read the story on The Register yesterday I can tell you that they are working on improving accuracy, and also improving recognition of full words (instead of one letter at a time, brief pauses in between) and possibly cursive text soon.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
By all means use this to record sensitive information, I'll just make sure I'll be near you when you're doing it to read whatever it is you're writing.
An interesting toy, but I see absolutely no realistic widespread uses of this what so ever.
-= This is a self-referential sig =-
For my undergraduate dissertation I did a similar project using the Wii remote and shape recognition, and I have to give them credit, their implementation of shape recognition is better than mine, however they have been felled by the same flaw as me in that accelerometers cannot determine rotation.
For my gesture/shape recognition, the lack of a gyro was less of an issue as I used only raw data to train and recognise movements with no concept of time, however anything that required measurement over time (in my case, emulating mouse movement on a PC) tended to make the mouse cursor dart off to one side of the screen because small rotations in the user's wrist would affect the incoming accelerometer readings (which did not show a difference between a rotation and a change in direction).
For me, as the designer/developer, I worked around this issue as I learned to make my movements in bursts (holding down a button, making a fast movement, releasing button) in order to control the movement, however this necessary workaround made this part of the project an epic failure. This is also the reason that Wii games don't "imitate" your movements with the remote, because the accelerometers can determine movement, they just cant determine the direction of the movement.
The conclusion that I drew, and a sentiment reflected by these guys is that for direction-variable acceleration accelerometers alone aren't up to the task, gyros are required.
As if it isn't bad enough with idiots wandering from side to side as they walk down the street. Now they have to frail their arms about too.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Why is this modded down?
Oh.... I see... Apple fanbois!!!!
Seriously where the fuck do these iPhone pricks come from?
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
I always have thought that the future would be just like the Harry Potter world. Everything is going smooth so far.
Celphone "real world" fps, except you point your phone at people.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I can just see it now: people standing in public, making ridiculous and distracting swooping motions, so they can post pointless and misspelled updates to twitter. "This lne at coffe shop is 2 long"
And if you don't make the movements that big then you're relying on people's perception of where they've moved the thing without them having instant feedback as to what they did, and most people's perception of their movement of a pen (with feedback) is a hell of a lot more accurate of their perception of the relative position they moved a lump of plastic in the air. Even if you alter it and do it on a surface (so doing it horizontally and making it effectively like a mouse) you're just going to end up scratching it or having the same "not quite the right place" effect that a lot of users get.
Use a pen or similar for your interface and you get instant feedback of what you just did. Start moving the phone around and either a) your accelerometers are so accurate that you're forever triggering the wrong input or b) they're accurate enough but you can't be sure what you wrote because your only feedback (the screen) is moving as well.
But hey, without ways of making people look silly while inputting data, where would we get our ideas for SciFi?
Thank God that I have lived to see these days. Today I can buy a phone that let's me "tweet" and "blog" and wave my hands in the air like some demented loon who's conducting an orchestra only he can see. Instead of, you know, being a PHONE.
In today's world, instead of using my phone to make a phone call, I can wave my phone in the air while holding my bottle of non-water-flavored water as I stand in line to buy non-coffee-flavored coffee. And I can watch pigs glow under UV light. How did I ever survive before?
threatens to completely change the meaning of "mime" in the context of e-mail.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I keep thinking of the guy that is drawing objects in the air that become "real" ... doors and hair dryers and such.
OK, this is akin to writing long-hand with the phone (which is so wonderfully efficient that the world invented keyboards), but still ...
Here's how to make this REALLY functional:
1. Put the acelerometers inside a pen shaped wedge piece of the phone.
2. Make it detachable.
3. Make it wireless (Bluetooth)
Voila... Pen annotation for phones.
Hell, you could make this an accessory for existing smartphones...
Umm, I think I shlould head to a patent lawyer office RIGHT NOW!!!
at least i won't have to listen.