PhonePoint Pen LetsYou Write On Thin Air !

The phrase"writing on thin air",atleast up till now has referred to something that gets vanished quickly.Researchers at Duke University have created what they are calling a "PhonePoint Pen" that uses a modern cell phone's built-in accelerometer to detect writing in thin air, and then automatically send a note to a designated e-mail account. There are still some bugs to work out, but the researchers believe they've proven that the idea really works.

"We are convinced that this is feasible and this will become something that people will use," Romit Roy Choudhury, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke.

"The existing technology wasn't all that great," he added. "And the idea struck me that maybe it's possible that I could have a pen with an accelerometer and I could just write in the air with the pen."

The accelerometer would detect the movement of the pen, and "then and I could press a button or something and the writing would get e-mailed to my mailbox. But getting a pen with an accelerometer was hard."

As an assistant professor, Roy Choudhury had a gaggle of creative students at his disposal, and he suggested they try to figure out how to use a cell phone as the magic pen he had wanted in college.

One cell phone manufacturer, Nokia, donated "a bunch" of phones, and the students found that if they held the phone like a pen, grasped between the thumb and the forefinger, they could control it's movements well enough for it to recognize letters of the alphabet.

They had to be pretty big letters, about six inches tall, and the user had to learn how to write with no frame of reference other than an imaginary blackboard, but it worked well enough to jot down a phone number, or an address, or where the car was parked at the airport.

That's progress, but it's not good enough. The researchers now say they've figured out how to make the phone recognize script, and translate that into text before sending it to a designated e-mail account.

"The phone can track what you are writing," Roy Choudhury said, and even if your penmanship isn't perfect it should be able to figure out which letter of the alphabet you are trying to write. Meanwhile, the accelerometer will track other movements as well. It should be possible to "write" yourself a note while driving your car.

"There are a lot of signals that the accelerometer captures," he added. "From all those signals, we can pluck out the part that comes from the moving vehicle, because there is a particular signature from a car's movements, and we can subtract that. "

A moving hand, for example, can change direction much more frequently and more quickly, than a vehicle. So the car can be taken out of the equation.

That may not sound too safe, but it could be a lot better than trying to text-message yourself on a keyboard that just seems to get smaller and smaller.

The device would also be able to clean up the signal while the user is walking, or doing just about anything else, he added.

The Duke researchers are also working on an idea that has intrigued many other scientists since the advent of cell phones with accelerometers. Theoretically, it should be possible for cell phones to provide real-time alerts on traffic congestion.