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Using Mobile Phones To Write Messages In Air

Posted by samzenpus on from the invisible-ink-2.0 dept.

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."

4 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Reading back? by gadget+junkie · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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)
    1. Re:Reading back? by rolfwind · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Think of Smart houses, in which by moving your mobile you can raise or lower the air conditioning and such.

      I'm sorry, but I would not want something as expensive as airconditioning controlled by a few flicks of the wrist on some phone. Most anything I have seen from smart houses I would not want in my home. Old-fashioned mechanical switches were 1000x more reliable than any digital switch I ever had, and any convenience or imagined savings went out the door when the digital switches, easily 10x more expensive, inevitably broke down 10x sooner. I still shudder to think about the ceiling fans that had impossible to find propietary wall switches.

      Programmable thermostats, photoelectric sensors, and timers is where I draw line. They're also about the only items that need regular replacement, can't imagine what an entire smart house would cost, probably much more just in idle electrical cost like the rest of the always-on gadgets of today let alone maintenance.

      Until houses are built truly smart that promise real savings I'm not sure what so smart about these gadget homes.

    2. Re:Reading back? by syousef · · Score: 2, Interesting

      News flash: Writing on an imaginary whiteboard is not as efficient as typing in text.

      Did you not even read the part where I said it might be good for drawing?

      That's not dismissive. I swear slashdot has gone to the fucking dogs lately. Anything remotely unpopular is shouted down as trolling. Makes Digg look like intelligentsia.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  2. Re:This is exciting ! by BrokenHalo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My initial reaction was "oh noes! Air graffiti!"...

    ...until I read how this works. Actually, the idea could be quite udeful for once. Seems to me it should be quite a small step to introduce some sort of OCR into the works to clean it up a bit...