[Tech] Apple's Sudden Motion Sensor

http://www.kernelthread.com/software/ams/

This guy crafted some interesting visualizations and hacks based on a sensor built into Apple PowerBooks.


Apple added a feature called Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) to the PowerBook line in early 2005. The sensor attempts to prevent data loss by parking the heads of an active disk drive after detecting a "sudden motion", which could be due to strong vibrations or a fall.

...

AMS Visualizer is a logical graphical extension of the amstracker command-line tool. It displays a 3D image of a PowerBook 15 that appears to "hang" in space.

...

This example creates a window displaying a bicycle wheel. The window is "stable" in the sense that if you rotate the PowerBook left or right, the window compensates by rotating itself by an equal amount in the opposite direction in an attempt to remain in its original orientation with respect to the ground. The bicycle wheel rotates too — independently of the window.

...

The "perturbed desktop" is hard to describe, and perhaps impossible to justify, even for a book example. It could be thought of as roughly the Stable Window concept applied to the entire graphical user interface, and then made unstable via some constraints. Now, nobody needs (hopefully) such "stable" windows in real life. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note the type of visual operations that are possible in Mac OS X.

Comments

Anonymous said…
My Toshiba M200 has had similar stuff since mid-2004. But, of course, they never put an API on it. So you can't actually get to the niftycool sensors and do anything interesting with them.
1:20 AM
Anonymous said…
What do you mean "they did not put an API on it"? Every such sensor *has* an API. The question is whether the vendor has published that API or not. For your information Apple doesn't publish anything about the PowerBook sensor either. So as per your definition "Apple hasn't put an API on it" either. This guy has REVERSE ENGINEERED the PowerBook sensor. It would be similar effort to reverse engineer any other sensor like your Toshiba or the ThinkPads.
4:47 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Fix a Jammed Toyota Camry Trunk

This problem needs a higher pagerank, so I figured I would post the solution here. If your Toyota Camry trunk won't open, one possible reason is that it is set to valet mode. Valet mode means that you cannot open the trunk using the release lever inside the car. To set valet mode, you put the key into the trunk lock and turn it counterclockwise. You will know that your trunk is in valet mode if the lock is horizontal rather than vertical, and if you cannot open the trunk using the lever near the driver's seat. Of course, a problem is that sometimes the Camry can get stuck in valet mode, such that you can't use your key to get out of it. (You can see how I spent part of my Sunday morning ...) The solution turns out to be WD-40 . Spray some WD-40 on your key and on the lock. Put the key in, and jiggle it around, and happiness ensues. From an interaction design perspective, it sort of makes sense to have a valet mode. After all, the point of having a valet key is to limit the
Read more

Web 2.0 and Research

I've been chatting with many of my friends and colleagues about an issue that's been bugging me for a while, namely whether academic research has any role to play in the emerging Web 2.0 . I've been slowly coming to the conclusion that the answer is not much. I had a similar discussion with other researchers at HotMobile a few weeks ago. When the web first came out, pretty much every systems researcher ignored it because it was so ugly. The web was not very sophisticated in terms of distributed systems, HTTP lacked elegance, HTML conflated many different ideas, and so on. There were also not any really new ideas with the web, as evidenced by the fact that Tim Berners-Lee 's first paper on the Web was (probably rightfully) rejected from an ACM conference on hypertext. I'm sure one thing that really irked researchers about the nascent web was that it completely ignored the large body of work in hypertext and distributed systems that had preceded it. Even in 1997, as
Read more

[Research] Famous Rejected Papers

I've always thought it would be fun to compile a list of famous rejected research papers, ones that later turned out to be highly influential. For example, in My Life as a Quant , the author tells the story of how the famous Black-Scholes paper (which describes how options should be priced) was rejected several times. The work eventually led to a Nobel Prize in economics. (Yes, I know, there technically is no Nobel Prize in economics). Then there's George Akerlof 's work on asymmetric information . I don't recall exactly, but I think the reviewers thought it was too simplistic. It also led to a Nobel Prize in econ. And then there's Tim Berners-Lee 's original paper on the World Wide Web. He describes his experiences in his book Weaving the Web . I think it was submitted to a hypertext conference, but was accepted only as a demo. I'm guessing reviewers didn't see much novelty in the work, which probably was correct from a research perspective.
Read more