Sloshing Cellphones Reveal Their Contents 160
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.
that's just stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Now, as for the detecting how many messages there are by simulating the sound of balls rattling around
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Re:that's just stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That said, I appreciate you concede the difficulty of battery life measurement. I'd long since given up on paying too much attention to gauges, and instead pay more attention to keeping backup batteries for devices which have removeable ones (it actually is a large factor in my decision making process whether o
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How about throwing all the physics and chemistry out of the window and simply using good old statistics? In a lot of chases the device should now when the battery was charged, for how long it was charged and for how long it ran on that charge, just use that data to extrapolate how long it will last the next time you charge it.
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batteries in your typical portable hardware are not used like that. Users will rarely if ever discharge them completely because they want/need the device to be working at all times. Discharge rates and sometimes charge rates too vary depending on how the device is being used and so on.
colomb counting is a slightly better idea but you s
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Neo1973 is supposed to get a coulomb counter as well as accelerometres.
So I guess I'll be able to slosh the phone, not only swing it around MacSabre style... If that thing is half as great as it sounds, it'll be my favourite toy.
And I might even phone someone from time to time.
Re:that's just stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:that's just stupid (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Not stupid, just different.
It's all about human interface. You may think it's dumb, but it may be just the thing that helps John Q. Public integrate a device into his lifestyle.
Remember that:Re: (Score:2)
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Sounds like a decent solution (Score:2)
Divide by the constant and you should get a pretty good (though over) estimate of the fraction used. If you want to go "really" complicated, you could multiply the correction factor by a correction factor based on how recently it was last updated, to account for the possibility of accelerating degradation. And even more c
Bat Summary Line (Score:2)
It's not as if the cell phone's contents are in any way being divulged... but rather a qualitative indication of battery life.
Re:Stupid typist (Score:1)
Ok... that should've read "Bad Summary Line" as a title...
More proof that just previewing a post isn't enough. I have to be awake too!
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Toy (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Toy (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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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 empty can is. When you pick up the can, the amount of inertia the can has tells you how heavy it is, just in one motion. Our brains rely on this kind of feedback when we handle physical objects. Ever picked up an empty can you thought was full? You end up exa
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Just like you can fly by pulling on your shoelaces, nothing you do can change the weight, either real or "perceived", of an object sitting in your hand.
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that is much more difficult to ignore.
Frankly, that's the problem I would have with this: I want to ignore my battery life most of the time. The only time I want to think about battery life is when it's just about to run out, and even then, I don't want some sort of a constant noise bugging me all the time.
I hate when cellphones/laptops beep incessantly when they're low on power. What if I know it's low on power and I just want to keep using it until it runs out? Do I need it to be beeping at me every
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Well, if you don't shake it, this is a passive technique as well. It's not like you'd already be shaking your phone under normal circumstances and this would clue you in to a low
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Well, all we need now is a mechanism like the one in shake-rechargeable flashlights...
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Its the same with aircraft controls, that have been debated for many years. There are many advantages to making them all electronic, but the problem is that electronics tend to only give information to the user through lights and sounds. Mechanical operation on the other hand gives feel to the controls, which give
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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.
Exactly. Use the other senses for a change. Where are all the smell and taste interfaces? When I'm on the NYC subway, I want to taste how close I am to the next stop. Actually, though, now that I think of it, the subway does seem to give a lot of information by smell.
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Its the same with aircraft controls, that have been debated for many years.
I get the point, but that probably wasn't the best example for this article...
"Hey Bob, how much fuel do we have left, could you check the gauge?"
"Nah, that's too much trouble, just shake the plane back and forth a bit. Ok, hold on, sshh, I'm trying to listen - one more time. Great. Yep, sounds like the tanks are
It's "Blind"ingly Obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Huh, I just hold down "1" for about 3 seconds and hear "you have no new messages". It's a digital control, no need to wiggle it til it responds. Blind users tend to like buttons as long as they've got tactile feedback.
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Sorta how a old-fashioned tape-player that is almost out of juice sounds.
Options! (Score:2)
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The battery charging problem was solved a long time ago by the iPod. Don't give good battery level feedback, give the user a reason to plug the device in other than just charging. My 3G iPod came with
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Apart from the things some people already mentioned, this seems to be a very nice feature for, say, blind users.
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Don't assume that all mobile phone users have the gift of sight.
Needs more cowbell... (Score:1, Offtopic)
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A cellphone without an accelerometer... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:A cellphone without an accelerometer... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
re: cool uses for accelerometers in phones (Score:2)
The most recent one was an electronic level. It draws the little bubble level on the phone's display, and the bubble moves just like a real level, indicating the phone sitting level when the bubble is between the 2 lines. It works pretty well, and given the shape of the iPhone (not likely to be attached to some sort of belt clip or holster that prevents it from lying flat on a surface), it's
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Apostrophe abuse in summary (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Apostrophe abuse in summary (Score:4, Funny)
oblig bob (Score:2)
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Yes. Yes they are.
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Terror Alert! (Score:5, Funny)
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."
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Pretty amazing really.
I wonder (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the shaking? (Score:1)
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Balls (Score:1)
I can't wait for this. I'll shake my cell phone, and someone will ask me WTF I'm doing. I'll proudly be able to proclaim, "My cell phone has balls!"
That's all well and good. (Score:1)
A solution to....? (Score:2, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it seems to be a solution that was applied to a problem that didn't need solving.
Now, perhaps if they linked the sloshing behavior to the amount of milk left in the carton as reported via my networked refrigerator, they'd have me interested.
Juice (Score:3, Funny)
Battery life (Score:2, Insightful)
Battery life isn't important for me: thanks USB (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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Which, I suppose, is why I don't have a mobile phone.
Patent? (Score:2)
Couple of musings... (Score:2, Funny)
Cool, but how about accurate battery life? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
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Indeed but then you have to allow for that fact that higher discharge rates tend to mean lower efficiancies and also allow for
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The individual who can figure out how to do this with cheap consumer grade components under the wide variety of load condtions even a single cell phone encounters... Is in for a life of fame and fortune. Predicting battery life, even under ideal conditions, is a crapshoot at best.
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Somebody is reading too much into the "batteries are like buckets of electricity" analogy we all got back in school. Real batteries don't work quite like that.
Yes they do. If you have three identical, batteries, all fully charged, then each of them will hold aproximately the same amount of energy. If you drain one of the 3 without touching the other 2 you have now drained 1/3rd of your available energy.
I'm not buying my Mum one of these... (Score:3, Funny)
Ha! I love it! (Score:4, Interesting)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not as if the Slashdot crowd have atrophied wrist muscles after all
Shaking (Score:2)
Neat for the blind (Score:5, Interesting)
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Or are you talking about voicemail? I guess I assumed that this hack was for txt only (thats what they show in the video)....what would be cool is if somebody could actually figure out a reliable way of telling me how many voicemails I have! My phone always says like 10-15 even though i usually have about 8.
more people in theaters jerking their (Score:2)
LoB
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Shameless plug (Score:2)
http://www.nongnu.org/bubblemon/ [nongnu.org]
The Bubbling Load Monitor (or "Bubblemon" for short) is a system CPU and memory load monitor. It displays something that looks like a vial containing water. The water level indicates how much memory is in use. The color of the liquid indicates how much swap space is used (watery blue means none and angry red means all). The system CPU load is indicated by bubbles floating up through the
Yet another... (Score:2)
Reminds me of the "internet is full" cartoon from Dilbert.
But... (Score:2)
Not bad, but... (Score:2)
Maybe some sort of submarine-style ballast tanks, but with helium?
Simpler Approach (Score:2)
No software update or accelerometer required.
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Also, getting sloshed while on your cell phone will better allow you to divulge your contents to anyone unlucky enough to be in your address book.
Yeah, that's fun. I have a buddy who tends to call his ex-girlfriend whenever he gets tanked. It got to the point where I had to take his cellphone from him before we hit the bars.
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