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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."
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.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Novel: Check
Excellent thesis topic: Check
Accolades from fellow CS geeks: Check
Impressive on resume: Check
Realistically useful: Uncheck
Better known as 318230.