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Darren Waters

Tilt to play - on a phone

  • Darren Waters
  • 18 Feb 08, 19:18 GMT

The best thing about the Game Developers Conference is that you can bump into the unexpected at any time.

Wandering back from a keynote speech I saw a man playing a 3D racing game on his Nokia N95 and he was controlling the action just by tilting the phone left or right, up or down.

I'd never seen this before - certainly not on a mobile. Mitri Wiberg, from Swedish firm Polarbit, told me that Nokia had included an accelerometer in the N95 but had not given developers access to the feature until very recently.

The accelerometer means that the phone can be used just liked Sony's Playstation 3 controller, and potentially like the Wiimote for the Nintendo, if used in conjunction with Bluetooth.

Mitri's simple demonstration shows that mobile phones can find a way to bypass the problems inherent with playing games on a handset, nameley the small buttons and form factor.

It's also indicative of a wider trend - finding more natural human machine interfaces that make gaming more accessible.

Comments

The latest Nokia handsets (including the N95 and N95 8Gb) all have the accelerometer built in (it was originally designed by Nokia so that camera knew if it was is landscape / portrait mode).

Since Nokia released the API to the open world, developers have been releasing some really cool stuff (some of it completely useless but funny!)

Check out www.nokia-n95.net (not owned by Nokia) for lot's of cool apps like:

RotateMe (screen turns when you turn the phone - like the iphone)

LightSabre (swing the N95 around like a sword and it makes starwars lightsabre sounds!)

A fishtank where the water level moves when you tilt the phone.

There are loads more with more being developed all the time! :)

I think that is about the only good thing I have heard about that phone. The N95 isn't popular with anyone I know.

The latest sony walkman phone has had this function since day one, and comes with a very nice marble game. Reminds you of the good ol' days!

  • 4.
  • At 10:30 AM on 19 Feb 2008,
  • Andrew Torrance wrote:

I wonder if the accelerometers are sensitive enough to act as to interpolate postion between known locations and hence be a poor mans location device . Should be cheaper than a GSM chipset ?

  • 5.
  • At 06:45 PM on 19 Feb 2008,
  • Larry wrote:

Check out the Sony Ericsson W760i. It has the same tilt-to-steer funcionality. It was announced at GDC and Cnet has a video demo of it.

Sony also support a tilting approach to games. The Sony Ericsson K850i comes with Marble Madness installed and can be controlled by tilting, its just not that easy to do when moving though.

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