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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."

9 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.

    --
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    1. Re:Reading back? by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      No! No! No! No! and No!

      This is a fantastic geeky little project. Please do not try to make it into something truely practical. It's a gimmick. A new technology needs to improve on the old. I could imagine using this to draw for example, but how does this slow method of entry beat the keypads we currently have on phones? Have you ever seen the speed with which a phone addicted teenage girl texts??? A new technology is only practical and should only be pushed if it actually makes things easier! Compared to a simple keyboard this method is ass.

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    2. 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. Hmmm by Zouden · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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"
    1. Re:Hmmm by teh+kurisu · · Score: 4, Informative

      Rubbish, there are loads of phones with accelerometers. The Nokia N95 for instance.

  3. It will go down well in Italy by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Funny

    It would probably allow Italians to have two conversations at once.

  4. Checklist by Dan+East · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Novel: Check
    Excellent thesis topic: Check
    Accolades from fellow CS geeks: Check
    Impressive on resume: Check
    Realistically useful: Uncheck

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    Better known as 318230.
  5. Oops! by qpawn · · Score: 3, Funny

    The best part is you can flip the device over when you make a mistake and pretend to pour Wite-Out®.

  6. Re:This is exciting ! by unixan · · Score: 3, Funny

    ...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.

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