New Japanese Mobile Phones Detect Motion

GreenTea writes "Some of the latest mobile phones in Japan come with motion sensors that let users detect motion or play action games like those on the Nintendo Wii console. The D904i from NTT DoCoMo, Japan's top mobile carrier, contains a tiny motion sensor that detects shaking and tilting, company spokesman Nobuyuki Hatanaka said. 'The software supports three main types of motion: shake, rock and roll. Shake can be used for actions such as rolling dice and shuffling MP3 decks. Rock interprets right, left, up and down gestures to generate traditional cursor-style user input commands. Roll offers joystick control by responding to tilting motions used in navigating games, maps or Web pages.'"

Re:It would be a nice safety feature....

[timeOday]

I've seen studies claiming that cellphone users are as bad as drunk drivers. How could that be? There should have been a massive increase (or any increase) in traffic fatalities, yet there was not [nih.gov]. Sure, there are counter trends such as airbags, but the claim that a huge percentage of people are effectively drunk driving, gives the strong impression there should be mayhem out there. Drivers do love to complain about each other, but again, look at the data I linked. I just don't see it.

Re:This is a bad hack

[phred75]

Actually, this isn't some flakey hack by any means. I'm a coder at this company and currently working in our mobile division. The technology has been perfected and runs efficiently (and even more so once I'm done optimizing key functions in ARM assembler). We have done quite a bit of testing and even in situations where there is lots of motion in the scene, the software is able to compensate quite nicely! We actually use the lowest resolution of the camera so power consumption is minimized. Sure accelerometers are more accurate BUT because they are so expensive, manufacturers are reluctant to use it and we offer a good alternative so long as you have a camera handy on your phone.

As for the technology, we can do quite a lot of cool things with it. As the article stated, we have 3 distinct types of motion we can detect - rock, roll and shake.

Roll can be used for ball rolling games, UI navigation or even as FPS controls. Shake has been used for shuffling an MP3 play list but can be used for rolling dice in an RPG or shooting virtual craps! The rock is perfect for "reloading" a gun or maybe throwing something in game. We had one app which allowed you to launch virtual pies at people. That was a popular one!

One thing is certain... we have done something right for Japan's LARGEST cell phone carrier to have picked us up for use in 2 major game releases using their phones - Crash Bandicoot and Katamari Damashii not to mention our tech has been in used in alot of other games already. We have our camera tracking on many platforms including the PS2, XBOX 360 and PC.

Here is the docomo press release:
http://www.nttdocomo.com/pr/2007/001335.html [nttdocomo.com]

What others are saying:
http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2007/04/25/2553676.h tm [tmcnet.com]
http://www.digitalmediaasia.com/default.asp?Articl eID=23946 [digitalmediaasia.com]