Tekno@MKST : Telefon boleh ubah bentuk dicipta

chewan

SEATTLE - Telefon pintar masa akan datang mungkin berupaya berubah bentuk bagi memberikan maklumat yang tidak mampu diberikan melalui bunyi atau paparan telefon kepada pengguna.

Sepasukan penyelidik sains komputer di University of Washington membangunkan telefon bimbit yang boleh dipicit, SqueezeBlock, menggunakan motor kecil yang dibina di dalam bekas telefon dengan fungsi yang sama seperti spring.

Pengesan tekanan pada peranti itu akan mengesan jumlah tenaga yang dikenakan ke atas bekas telefon, manakala motor akan mengawal tindak balas yang sesuai.

Kadar picitan boleh dikawal oleh status telefon untuk menyampaikan maklumat asas mengenai keadaan telefon bimbit tanpa memerlukan pengguna melihat atau mendengarnya.

Sebagai contoh, jika bateri telefon masih penuh, telefon sukar dipicit kerana berada dalam keadaan keras tetapi jika bateri peranti itu hampir habis, ia akan mudah dipicit seperti memicit bola getah.

Selain itu, tahap keanjalan telefon itu juga boleh memberi maklumat lain seperti jumlah emel penting yang belum dibaca.  

credit to sinar harian online

chewan

rasa mcm tak kena shj konsep penyelidikan n fungsi yg di ubah suai.. kalau berckp soal minima ruang mungkin boleh d terima

chewan

The smartphone of the future might lose its sleek, solid shell to become a shape-shifter, able to alter its appearance to signal an alert in situations where visual and audible cues won't do.

Shwetak Patel, a computer science and engineering researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, and colleagues have developed a squeezable cellphone – SqueezeBlock – using tiny motors built into the casing to mimic the behaviour of a spring.

Pressure plates on the device detect how much force is being applied to the casing, while the motors control the amount of resistance exerted in response. Because the resistance can be tweaked, the degree of squishability can be controlled by some aspect of the phone's status to provide some basic feedback without demanding the attention of eyes or ears.

For example, after the battery is fully charged, the phone might feel as taut as a glutton's post-lunch belly, while a gadget running on empty might be as easy to squeeze as a stress ball. Alternatively, the stiffness could convey the number of emails marked as important that have arrived in a user's inbox.

"You can imagine squeezing the phone to give you a little bit of information on its status – ring level, messages – without having to look at it," says Patel.
Squish test

In trials, Patel asked 10 people to test seven different uses of SqueezeBlock. They were able to distinguish up to four levels of squishiness, suggesting it could provide a basic way of checking battery charge, for instance.

The work was presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in New York last week.

Shwetak's team isn't alone in exploring how a handset's physical attributes could communicate something about its state. Back in 2008, Fabian Hemmert, a researcher at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin, Germany, breathed virtual life into a cellphoneMovie Camera. His phone "inhales" and "exhales" at a steady rate, which can increase suddenly to indicate an incoming call, or ebb away as the battery dies.

Hemmert is now exploring how tactile feedback could provide further cues. He has devised mechanisms that enable mobile devices to change their shape and even their weight.

credit to http://www.newscientist.com/