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 cell 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 (demo and paper). A variety of applications may emerge, for instance, a tourist could take a picture with her phone camera, and annotate it immediately with a short caption. While rushing in an airport with luggage in one hand, a user may be able to note down a self-reminder by waving the phone pen in air. 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.