PowerBook As A New Kind Of Human Interface Device

An anonymous reader writes "As covered earlier on Slashdot, Amit Singh had shown how to access and use the motion sensor feature in the late model PowerBooks for innovative things, which created quite a buzz in the Mac community. In an ingenius new article, Singh has taken the idea all the way and released software which lets you use a PowerBook with a motion sensor as a general purpose input device which works with existing apps. IMHO the coolest use of this is for playing games: be sure to check out the video footage in the article. For instance, in a car racing game, you steer by tilting the PowerBook left and right, go faster by tilting it forward, brake by tilting it backwards! You can also scroll in apps. Google Map scrolling with my PowerBook feels like flying in an aiprlane over the terrain. I must say you have to try this in real life to appreciate the experience ... go to the Apple store or something if you don't have the hardware ;-) Before this my girlfriend (who uses a Dell notebook) has never called anything computer related "jawdropping"! Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sensor be standard issue in all future laptops?"

I've really gotta wonder....

[UnixRevolution]

How much good all this tilting and stuff does the hard drive. I'd think it caused some undue wear and tear, if not a head crash. Plus, to be picking up the whole laptop for use as an interface device seems a bit risky. Especially a Powerbook (you're talking around 2 grand there, Slim.)

Innovative, but not necessarily good

[Nom du Keyboard]

And how much worse does this torque the bearings of the fast-spinning, gyroscopically-simulating hard drive?

Re:Fake Article

[Anonymous Coward]

haha!
you've gotten us again with your clever insight into SlashDot and nerd culture.
Oh how I wish I could ignore any post referencing a "meme".

racing game appliations

[drunken dash]

I don't think this is a particularly good application for racing games, because if you watch the video, since you're actually tilting the notebook, the screen tilts with it. It's somewhat disorienting, and requires you to tilt your head repeatedly (as you turn) which will quite likly get annoying real fast.

Many times HD asleep anyway

[SuperKendall]

Depending on how you have your power settings, the HD is probably going to be asleep most of the time anyway. And the gentle motion you're talking about here is hardly going to be enough to phase a laptop drive - I've got a portable storage device that uses a laptop drive and had it sucessfully write a whole GB of data while I was walking quickly and had it in a pocket in my shorts.

In short, don't worry about the HD... slippery fingers might be a bit more of a concern but just be careful to do this above your lap, not held high in the air like a trophy.

First we put the computer in the joystick...

[suitepotato]

...with those Atari games that can now be contained completely within the base of the thing. Now we turn an expensive laptop into a joystick. And I thought it was expensive to get a broken Gravis joystick replaced.

Somewhere in the future as AI/Expert software spreads, "Will you stop freaking shaking me like that and get a gyro mouse already?! I'm getting nauseous and feel like I need to take a hex dump. I think I'm going to reformat..."

Solution: keyboard

[AtariAmarok]

"How much good all this tilting and stuff does the hard drive. I'd think it caused some undue wear and tear"

The solution to this is to market a keyboard with the same capabilities. This keyboard could be plugged into the Powerbook, at which point it would disable the Powerbook's internal "shake controller". Then you could rag on the keyboard without worrying about shaking up the Powerbook. It makes it less portable, of course...

What the hell is the big deal?

[xtal]

It's an accellerometer! There have been inertial mice based off these guys for as long as the sensors have been available.

There's some projects out there to hack one of these into some earlier palmpilots directly onto the bus, a nifty hack. Oh, wait, starting to get that feeling..

http://slashdot.org/articles/00/03/30/1546247.sh tm l

Sigh. I have a powerbook and like it, but new kind of HID? Please.

Call me when they have a camera in there like the Sony vaio picturebook used to, and you can wave your arms at it and such. Then it might be a new interface device.

Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sensor

[biglig2]

Well, no.

Don't get me wrong, this is a cool hack, but a 17" powerbook weighs over 3 kilograms.

You know how your Xbox controller was a bit big? Well, it wasn't that big.

Why discredit an innovative idea?

[SuperKendall]

Other laptops may have had this for years...

So where are the Windows apps that make use of this sensor?

Apple doesn't even deserve credit for this one as they include the sensor for the same reason everyone else does. Apple does deserve a little credit for making the output of this sesnor accessible to the programmer, and then the guy that developed the initial software to make use of it deserves the lions share of the credit for saying "hey, what if I did this!".

In your rush to discredit Apple, you were a bit too hasty in dismissing the accomplishments of the programmer as well.

Another application

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm rather surprised no one has yet thought of applying this to a Pinball game. Tilt indeed. Could get rather rough with the bumping though.

Laptops are big...Mice are small

[amichalo]

"Laptops are big...Mice are small...add a motion sensor to a blue-tooth mouse and you will drop my jaw."

I don't get it

[DrugCheese]

I can't see this becoming anything more then a novelty. So instead of doing something easily and quickly with a mouse or a touchpad underneath your hand. You're gonna hold a 5-12 pound laptop in your hands. After 4 minutes of gaming you're arms will be tired.

Re:I've really gotta wonder....

[gl4ss]

um.. isn't the whole reason for the sensor being there to be able to park the harddisk if going gets rough?

Re:Why discredit an innovative idea?

[jedidiah]

I'm not sure that tilting a machine while it is powered on and using THAT as an input device is such a hot idea to begin with. This sound like the perfect little toy for a bunch of technically impaired users that like feeling trendy.

Re:Innovative, but not necessarily good

[DavidLeblond]

Uh... yeah, motion is bad for hard drives...

If you want to jog with an iPod, do it with an iPod Shuffle.

Re:Innovation

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, the IBM Thinkpad's motion sensor and the work by IBM's researcher Amit Singh is a great Apple© Innovation(TM) that can only come from Apple©!

Safer to have this in your keyboard or mouse

[ecotax]

Several problems have already been mentioned, like using the whole laptop like this defies the original reason ot have a motion sensor - to protect the hard disk -; plus, it's a bit heavy too.

Still, an input device like this would be cool, but I'd rather have it integrated in my (separate) keyboard or mouse.

Re:More from Amit Singh

[thesixthreplicant]

well it shows you how easy it is to develop something this non-trivial using XCode and how "difficult" it is on other platforms. Either you get Mac OS X or you just complain about its "eye candy"

Re:Complete Crap

[l4m3z0r]

So in otherwords your post is: stages of development and innovation are pointless. Why don't we just make the best thing first and not waste our time on intermediate inventions and trials?

Wow this is perhaps the most genius post ever, why didn't we think of just doing it properly first instead of spending decades improving technology step by step???

Surely your revelation will usher in a new era of computing. Hell before this we hadn't even been thinking thanks fsterman, thanks.

WARNING: Comment may include sarcasm in reply to a horribly naive and foolish post.

Not that new at all.

[Synbiosis]

Anyone remember the Microsoft SideWinder Freestyle Pro [joystickreview.com] from 2000? Didn't work out too well. Turns out using a tilt sensor for gaming was just another gimmick that quickly disappeared.

Re:Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sen

[Jeff DeMaagd]

You do have a point, but those heavy laptops generally have other design flaws, namely using chips simply not designed for mobile use. It amazes me that people will buy this sort of machine because they must have the most power available, then have the nerve to complain about battery life. The uber-notes generally get only about 10% faster speed at best, for most desktop and gaming uses, and sacrifice half the battery life over systems that use chips properly chosen for the task.

New applications

[theolein]

While I doubt that a notebook is an ideal platform for this type of gaming, mainly because the keyboard is difficult to hit while tilting the notebook (you need both hands), I can see that Amit Singh has already thought about either selling the idea, the software, or patenting it, since his licence is only for a 10 minute demo preview. Apple might be wanting to include this software, or possibly even games that use it, in future macs.

Also, from the original submitter's story:
Wouldn't it be nice to have a gaming motion sensor be standard issue in all future laptops?"

I think that Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft have more to gain by making game controllers that use this technology. A lot of people, me included, don't like the tiny joysticks or pads on standard controllers. A controller using this technology would be much more natural. In fact, I'm postive that it will end up being used pretty soon.

Apple, or Amit Singh would be crazy not to patent the idea.

Re:Why discredit an innovative idea?

[gilesjuk]

It's useful for about two reasons, autolocking the laptop when someone tries to run off with it and parking the hard disk when the laptop is moved.

Can't think of much else that isn't gimmicky.