Sloshing Cellphones Reveal Their Contents

holy_calamity writes "UK researchers have developed software that represents a handset's battery life by using a phone's speaker and vibrator to make a device feel and sound like it contains liquid. You give it a shake to find out how much is left. The same technique can be used to represent new messages by simulating balls rattling around inside a box. It runs on recent Nokias with accelerometers; video from the researchers explains it well." What a bizarrely fun idea.

Toy

It sounds fun, but I don't understand how shaking a phone is functionally superior to simply looking at the screen to gauge battery life or messages. Not to mention shaking your expensive mobile device around may not be the smartest idea. Flying wiimotes, anyone?

Re:Toy

It sounds fun, but I don't understand how shaking a phone is functionally superior to simply looking at the screen to gauge battery life or messages.

You're new here, aren't you?

Show me anything in the world that a geek won't want to tinker with and hack in odd ways. It's this kind of thing that will eventually lead to Star Trek tech. It takes a hundred or a thousand "useless little hacks" to filter out the one gem that will be the killer hack. And sometimes, you can take a piece of one useless hack and a piece of another useless hack and put them together to make something awesome.

Yes, this may not be the most useful modification in the world, but think of what it could lead to...

Re:Toy

It's incredibly useful really.

The battery indicator on your screen is passive. It just sits there (largely unnoticed) until your critically low on battery and then it beeps at you incessantly. By adding a physical element to the indicator you provide an ongoing battery status (in a very easy to understand metaphor no less) that is much more difficult to ignore.

It is a very similar concept to the gestures used to control the iPhone. The trend in computing right now is to create interfaces that much more closely mimic physical experience. This has proven to greatly increase our ability to interact in meaningful ways with our machines. This is just another example of that.

Really it wins on two points: 1) It's a useful piece of tech. and 2) it's an insanely cool hack.

Re:Toy

I have to wonder though, why bother with a physical interface at all?

The battery indicator on your screen is passive. It just sits there (largely unnoticed) until your critically low on battery and then it beeps at you incessantly. By adding a physical element to the indicator you provide an ongoing battery status (in a very easy to understand metaphor no less) that is much more difficult to ignore.

Very good point, but I'm not convinced I'd like to shake my phone to get an indication of power (not that the standard power meter is going anywhere I suppose) but I'd like a passive aural indicator - how about the phone altering the pitch of all of those poloyphonic ringtones as the charge diminishes? Normal ringtone for 100-30% charge, and then increase the pitch delta as charge drops from that. As soon as you get a call or a text, you can immediately hear something's "wrong" with your phone (consider the age-old comedy stalwharts of the broken alarm bell or the out of tune piano), and it'll have the useful side effect of actually improving a large percentage of ghastly ringtones ;)

Re:

This is just a version 1.0 hack, but I could see lots of different uses for this.

When you pick up an opened can of soda, do you have to shake it vigorously to figure out how full it is? No... you generally know how heavy a full can is, and how heavy an emp

Re:

But the problem is that we get more and more screens to look at all the time. Our eyes get all the input, but that means the rest of our senses are just sitting around, basically, which is a waste.

Its the same with aircraft controls, that have been debated

It's "Blind"ingly Obvious

I have to imagine that any blind user of a cell phone would think this is awesome. No longer do you have to wade through some exchange with a computer to figure out if you have messages; you just shake your cell phone. And figuring out your charge without any need for visual interaction must be useful, too.

Additionally, though, I don't think there is all that much problem with shaking solid-state electronics. The 'Wiimote syndrome' isn't at issue, because you're not trying to control cartoon characters on the screen - and shaking a rattle, say, is a far more sedate activity than swinging a hammer. Unless you're way, way hyper-aggressive.

A cellphone without an accelerometer...

Is like a cow without an altimeter.

Re:

How else are you gonna know when the cow's about to hit the ground, huh?

Re:A cellphone without an accelerometer...

That answer is only valid if you are located higher than the cow's current position. If the cow was, for example, just catapulted from a fortress by french knights [youtube.com], and you were standing in the range of the catapult, you'd better look up.

However, if the cow would have an altimeter coupled to a wifi server, you could read out it's height independent of your own position so you wouldn't need to decide whether you should look up or down.

Apostrophe abuse in summary

Nokia's

An apostrophe does not mean, "Look out! Here comes an S!"

Re:Apostrophe abuse in summary

Nope. An apostrophe usually means, "Look out! Here come the grammar nazis"

Terror Alert!

I think this is a good idea -- harnessing already honed human perceptions and using them to relieve some of the bandwidth hogging our visual senses are subjected to. It could be quite intuitive, and save valuable screen real estate.

On the other hand, I guess it means we can't take our mobile phones on airplanes anymore, can we?

Homeland Security Agent: "How much liquid is in that phone?"

You: "None. It's virtual liquid."

Homeland Security Agent: "It sounds like at least a few ounces."

You: "Virtual liquids have neither volume nor weight."

Homeland Security Agent: "Do I look stupid to you?"

You: "Can I take the fifth on that?"

Homeland Security Agent: "That's Mistake Number Two, bub. Quoting from documents concerning the governance or liberties of American citizens is suspicious activity Level Blue. Ever heard of Ron Paul?"

You: "Uh, sure."

Homeland Security Agent: "You're under arrest."

I wonder

How much faster the battery runs out with this feature. Its always annoyed me that my phone beeps every min when the battery becomes low. I thought the idea was when the phone starts to run out of power to conserve it to make it last long enough till you could charge it next. Considering how much faster my phone dies with the sound on and beep compaired to when I have the sound off and low bat, i wonder how much juice it takes to shake the thing to check the bat level.

Juice

I guess this puts a new spin on the colloquialism of how much "juice" is left in a battery.

Battery life isn't important for me: thanks USB

Thanks to the mini-USB connector on my phone, battery life is completely not important to me. In the car, I charge my phone. At work or at a client's, I plug it into a laptop or PC. If I am desperate, I have a little USB hand crank that can power my phone for 20 minutes with about 3 minutes of cranking.

When cell phones had proprietary connectors that changed with each new model, battery life was maybe #3 on my list of important features. Now I don't even think of it. I can not recall a day in the past year when I had less than 60% battery life (even with WiFi and Bluetooth enabled on my HTC Trinity).

Is it really a big deal for a lot of people? Where are you that you can't plug in, even if just for 10-15 minutes to top off your battery?

Cool, but how about accurate battery life?

While this is very cool, it does bring up a pet peeve of mine: why can't devices show accurate battery life?

Currently, all battery charge indicators are wildly nonlinear and grossly inaccurate.

To be more specific. Conceptually, imagine a device that holds three small batteries instead of one large one, and drains them in succession one after the other. The battery life measurement on each battery would be somewhat imprecise, but when you'd exhausted the first battery you'd know that you really had 2/3 of the charge left; when you'd exhausted the second, you'd know that you really had 1/3 left.

Alternatively, how about a device that holds two smaller batteries and double-buffers them; that is, draws from one battery until it's exhausted, then draws from the second while allowing you to replace the first?

I'm not buying my Mum one of these...

I can just see her filling her mobile phone full of water when 'the liquid has run out'.

Ha! I love it!

Most of our computer humor comes from people trying to apply inappropriate models to understanding the way computers work, thinking they're like cars or household appliances. I've had people ask me if computers need tune-ups, belts changed, etc. And us techs can be dicks about it, too. "Yeah, you dropped that CD and now all the bits shifted to one side. It's going to be unbalanced, like a washing machine. So what you need to do is shake the CD until all the bits get evenly distributed."

Shaking the battery to hear how "full" it is, it's an intuitive approach for someone who knows nothing about technology and makes the geeks laugh, but here they go and make it work. Very, very funny. But this is the sort of thinking that helps make the toys easier to use. More power to 'em.

Why not do two things at once?

Add in small magnets + coils (or reverse run the accelerometer if it's suitable) and charge the phone from the shaking?

It's not as if the Slashdot crowd have atrophied wrist muscles after all :-) [runs for cover]

Neat for the blind

My sister-in-law is legally blind and she is always asking how much battery life is left on her phone and how many messages she has. From an accessibility perspective, I think it's a pretty neat idea. Otherwise, it's a useless feature.

Re:

All true, but you can't deny that this is a pretty cool tactile feedback mechanism! More of these great ideas please!

Re:that's just stupid

As a manufacturer of portable data terminals, we always seem to spend an excessive amount of time in attempting to get a better indication of the amount of power left in a battery. Each battery chemistry has it's own set of rules and the rules tend to change as the battery ages.

One of the better methods is to use a coulumb counter that attempts to measure the power put into a battery against the power removed from the battery. See http://www.linear.com/pc/productDetail.jsp?navId=H0,C1,C1003,C1037,C1134,P2354 [linear.com] for a typical device. Even using these, we only seem to be able to approach something that doesn't suck.

One of our devices has a tilt sensor, so I may try to impliment the sloshing sound as well as our normal battery icon on the display.

Re:that's just stupid

Even the best battery "life" indicators I've ever seen mostly suck. If this one uses the dropoff in voltage as a detection device like every other one has for the last brazillion years, it'll basically be completely full for the life of the charge, and about 10 minutes before it tanks, if you're lucky, you'll get the joy of the sensation of a sloshing, albeit mostly empty sloshing, in your digital device.

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

This implementation in-and-of-itself does not really signify any important breakthrough to me. Just a bunch of geeks who took a feature and put a software aspect to it for a unique function. However, this is the second cell-phone shakey [slashdot.org] article I've seen on Slashdot recently. So, what really matters to me is the meta-content here: adding an accelerometer to a cellphone opens up a lot of functionality on the mobile platform.

Re:that's just stupid

It's in reference to a joke I'd heard a while back...

In his early morning Iraq war briefing Bush's advisor said 2 Brazilian soldiers had died the day before. After a pause, Bush leaned over to Cheney and asked him, "How many zeros are in a brazillion?"

No political affiliation or skewering intended... just a funny joke.