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."

Re:Welcome to 2004

[L4t3r4lu5]

Fail.

This is an app which uses the accelerometer in the iPhone and handwriting recognition to create notes on the phone itself. Nothing to do with writing letters in the air which are visible to other people.

I know this is slashdot, but you are expected to RTF'ing stub at least.

H2G2

[s1lverl0rd]

For years radios had been operated by means of pressing buttons and turning dials; then as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive--you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. It saved a lot of muscular expenditure, of course, but meant that you had to sit infuriatingly still if you wanted to keep listening to the same program.

-- Douglas Adams

Re:Reading back?

[syousef]

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.

Checklist

[Dan East]

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

Re:Reading back?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice to have this available to sign for packages, I hate those tiny screens they have you try put some resemblance of your signature on.

Re:Checklist

[that IT girl]

Agreed... I don't know about the rest of you, but I type much, much faster than I write. Even on my phone, texting with T9 (no QWERTY keyboard on my phone, ya sissies) I can tap out a message much more quickly and tirelessly than waving my phone around for ages.
Also, I could see this having huge problems. Even on the Nintendo DS, where the stylus actually touches the screen, it doesn't recognise the way I write a few letters and numbers. I would think the margin for error is even worse in the air, when you can't actually see what you've written. Nice idea, but likely just frustrating in the end.