My principal interest in mobile applications is to push the boundaries of innovation to create uniquely mobile experiences. I hope my blogs excite and challenge developers to think 'outside the box'.
Motion Control for 3-D Mobile Virtual/Augmented Reality Worlds
coultonp | 05 March, 2008 21:23
As many of you will realise I have been a long term advocate of accelerometers on phones and have a number of students having worked in this area. Today I wanted to present the novel S60 API developed by my PhD student Fadi Chehimi to provide 3-D motion control for navigating with 3-D virtual and augmented environments running on mobile phones which we have called Mirage-X. To demonstrate the power of the API , Fadi and I came up with the very simple game we have called Mirage Money the aim of which is that players ‘fly’ around in the 3-D world collecting the floating silver and gold coins by colliding with them on the screen. There game has two playing modes:Real Mirage where coins are augmented on images captured by the phone camera, and Virtual Mirage where the coins are floating in a virtual, sky-bounded environment. As these concepts are best explained with a video we have created the one below.
This game further illustrates the power of accelerometers and in particular the advantage of this interface is that it not only minimizes the use of buttons on the phone it also allows a more intuitive interface experience and allows the user to maintain the optimum viewing angle to the screen.
We are also currently investigating two further game extensions that will expand the possibilities of using the API, the first will allow two players to battle through space over a Bluetooth connection and second will utilize the N95’s GPS to create a novel augmented reality location based game.
The use of GPS with the API has then obvious uses within the fields of tourism or information services but in an ideal case we would also have access to a digital compass to provide accurate orientation. Having pleaded the case for accelerometers in the past can I now suggest a digital compass? 
As it has lots of possible benefits and in particular I can see it helping with pedestrian navigation.
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My principal interest in mobile applications is to push the boundaries of innovation to create uniquely mobile experiences. I hope my blogs excite and challenge developers to think 'outside the box'.
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