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."
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)
"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
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...
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
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.
Or you could use, I don't know, a special kind of paper that would display the writing of the stylus in real time and store it. Made compact enough this would be awesome for note taking on the go.
I can't believe nobody thought of it before.
You wouldn't even need a cell phone to use it ! Think of the possibilities !
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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 =-
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?"
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?
...introduce some sort of OCR into the works to clean it up a bit
Until then, expect your "sent" folder to be full of unexpected messages. Like the following. :)
jvjw~~wwwy
You are a typical person.
)(~!!
You are a teeny bopper.
-x-x-x
You were moonwalk dancing.
%!%!%!
You are no longer horny.
This signature intentionally left unblank.
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.