Motion sensors in laptops are not new, IBM’s Thinkpads had several series that utilized it. But what is new is the ability to program the sensors to do some cool things. Apple’s Sudden Motion Sensor in the new PowerBooks detect strong vibrations or sudden motion and park the drives. Now the sensor can detect the angle of the PowerBook and the velocity of the movement. This makes for a hacker’s delight.
Enterprising hackers have discovered that because the new motion sensor returns reasonably accurate measurements to Mac OS X, it can be used to do some cool tricks, from realigning an image in a window so it always points up, no matter what angle you hold the laptop at, to controlling what’s playing in iTunes — rock the machine backward to go to the next track, forward to play the previous one.
Amit Singh, the researcher whose work has sparked a wave of small yet useful tilt-sensitive programs, discovered the motion sensor when working on a book about the internals of OS X, and was immediately struck by its potential… One of the first programs to utilize Singh’s work was Bubblegym, a game written by Peter Berglund. Berglund’s reaction when seeing the code that Singh had produced was typical of many coders working on tilt-sensitive projects: “I thought it was amazing — I got the same feeling of awe as the first time I saw a color screen and the first time I saw a QuickTime clip,” he said. Out of this evolved Bubblegym, which Berglund believes is the first tilt-sensitive game for a computer. Berglund’s work earned praise from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who wrote a personal e-mail of congratulations — something that Berglund described as “a cooler thing than any game or technology itself.”
Wired News