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ForcePhone App Uses Ultrasonic Tone To Create Pressure-Sensitive Batphone (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Stack: Researchers at the University of Michigan have created an app that makes any smartphone pressure-sensitive without additional hardware. The app, called ForcePhone, uses ultrasonic tones in the existing microphone and speaker hardware that respond to pressure for additional functionality for touchscreens. The app emits a high-frequency ultrasound tone from the device's existing microphone, which is inaudible to humans but can be picked up by the phone. That tone is calibrated to change depending on the pressure that the user gives on the screen or on the body of the phone. This gives users an additional way to interact with their device through the app alone. The additional functionality provided by ForcePhone can be used in a number of ways. Squeezing the body of the phone could take a user back a page, for example; or increased pressure on the touchscreen could act as a 'right-click' function, showing additional information on the app in use. Kan Shin, Professor at the University of Michigan, said, "You don't need a special screen or built-in sensors to do this. Now this functionality can be realized on any phone." He added, "We've augmented the user interface without requiring any special built-in sensors. ForcePhone increases the vocabulary between the phone and the user."
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Working at 18 khz, this is still within human capacity. It will irritate the hell out of dogs and cats.
And how is it supposed to work when you listen to music and play a game?
And not to mention battery drain.
Sorry. Complete rubbish.
The app emits a high-frequency ultrasound tone from the device's existing microphone
A microphone is for recording sound, not generating it.
But if you squeeze it too hard, does it ejaculate?
How will dogs feel about this?
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Constant blast of supersonic sound at a volume where the microphone can pick up distinguishable differences is not exactly going to come cheap, particularly when you add the necessary processing power into it. What's with the next phone user trying the same? What with noise? A perfectly periodic signal will not contain frequency components below the fundamental, but the idea is to pick up on the changes from the perfect periodicity and those lead to lower frequency components (basically AM but likely with nonlinear artifacts as well when you want to capture pressure effects).
It's just a stupid idea. If you want sensitivity to pressure, build in a screen with a suitable sensor instead of trying to abuse existing sensors.
Bat's have evolved. Take a hint from that.
If this functionality leads to an app which can detect being in a pocket, and defeat dialing when the phone is in a pocket, I'm all for it.
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The app emits a high-frequency ultrasound tone from the device's existing microphone
I checked, for once it is not an error in the summary, the error is in the actual article.
Anyway, it should be "speaker", the microphone is used to pick up the sound to detect any tone shifts that would indicate pressure on the phone. I highly doubt that this is not very dependent on the construction of the phone, but who am I to doubt "batphone" technology...
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The inaudible sound is generated by the speakers, not the microphone. Do you guys ever stop to think or just copy/paste?
Well, three.
In my day a Batphone was a big red phone that sat under a glass dish, and instead of a dial* it had single pushbutton. And when you pressed that button the Batphone on the other end started glowing and beeping in order to indicate an incoming call. That's a Batphone.
* A long time** ago telephones used to have rotary dials with all the digits 0 to 9 spaced around them with each digit associated with a finger sized hole. In order to make your phone call you would dial*** your number digit by digit. This involved placing your finger in the hole associated with the digit and rotating the complete dial clockwise until you reached the finger stop. At this point you would remove your finger and the dial would return to its original position. During the return phase the phone would issue a series of audible clicks, with the number clicks issued being calibrated to the digit that was dialed. These clicks were transmitted to the phone company and encoded the digit that was dialed.
** An even longer time ago telephones didn't even had dials. Instead they used voice activation (in a manner similar to Siri or Cortana or Echo, but implemented like Amazon's Mechanical Turk EG in a distributed manner) in order to complete your phone call. EG "Operator, connect me with ...."
*** Anachronism alert. Even though modern phones do not have rotary dials, us people with onions on our belts still "dial numbers"
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This sounds (no pun intended) like Apple 3D Touch, only crappy. And it pollutes the environment, too.
What about hearing damage? Inaudible is subjective. I can clearly hear 18kHz. I feel pain when near anti deer and anti cat devices that work similarly. Small children could have their hearing damaged and experience pain or anxiety from this. About time people agree to leave 16kHz to 25kHz frequencies alone. They are NOT inaudible to everyone.
"Squeezing the body of the phone could take a user back a page, for example".
Yes, because that's REALLY intuitive and obvious. Not.
Given the limitations of a cell phone for audio, I sure hope that the engineers haven't wasted energy making them emit and detect frequencies outside the true range of human hearing. 18 Khz is still well within audibility for many people.
"This gives users an additional way to interact with their device through the app alone."
Translation:
"This gives advertisers an additional way to collect data on people that they'll never suspect."
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
I would like to try one of these apps in my hand. I often hear high painful things designed to do shit like scare away bugs and birds that others around the city cannot. Even went to a few city council meetings to get some of them removed so I could walk down the street from my apt. Some of them are more of a feeling where I know its going on and it just feels odd (dog whistles), but some of them are pain stabs in all my face holes.
To make this work the speaker has to be continuously emitting a high frequency sound