An Ode to the Accelerometer
January 28, 2008 by Jayvee Fernandez
Filed under Accessories, Editorial
Have you ever wondered what makes the iPhone recognize that you’re tilting its screen horizontally or vertically? Or what makes the new Sony Ericsson W760 browse through your music library with a firm shake?
Several months ago, TIME Magazine wrote a really good article on the Nintendo Wii and how it had changed gaming from couch potato to couch throwing. There was one sidebar on that piece that dissected the Wiimote, the secret to the Wii’s success. The blueprint showed the presence of the accelerometer - a device that measures vibration, tilt, motion with and without the influence of gravity. What makes the accelerometer even more interesting is that it actually is a very basic device that is very cheap to produce. There’s no magic involved, really. I’m not sure, but from what I remember from the TIME article, the accelerometer didn’t cost more than a dollar in mass production.
Accelerometers were obviously used in machinery such as vehicles and tools and is now being incorporated into electronic devices. Laptops like some models of the IBM Thinkpad (now Lenovo) had an accelerometer built in to measure whether a hard drive was falling at 9.8 meters per second squared (accidentally dropping a laptop). Some point and shoot cameras have these as well for tilting images when reviewing. Now they are being placed into phones as well.
Truth is, accelerometers are so easy to incorporate into a device. The tricky part is to make them work well with the software, adding a seamless interaction that doesn’t seem awkward. Perhaps one of the complains some people have would be when using phones in bed, when you’re hunched to one side. The phone thinks that you’re tilting the phone when in fact you’re just lying to your side. The option to use motion sensors can be turned off though, but still.
I really feel that 2008 will have the accelerometer technology mainstream-ed into portable gadgets. It’s all about finding creative ways to use this technology, making it elegantly incorporated into the software.
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Check out what others are saying about this post...[...] like a pen to scribble letters. I think the setup works like a combination of the Wiimote’s accelerometer from Nintendo and maybe, in the future, the Canson Papershow which I reviewed several months back. [...]