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Sensors, not CPUs, are the tech that swings the smartphone market
Flash back a quarter of a century: I’m sourcing components for a consumer virtual reality system. An accelerometer is an absolute necessity in a head-mounted display, because it senses the motion of the head. Accelerometers exist in silicon, but priced at US$25 apiece, their only customer is the automotive industry - sensors used to trigger deployment of the airbags in a crash.
In the end, I invented my own sensor, because silicon accelerometers cost too much.
A few hundred million smartphones later, accelerometers and gyroscopes have become cheap as chips. Literally. From twenty-five dollars to less than twenty-five cents, the conjunction of Moore’s Law and Steve Jobs made these sensors cheap and abundant.
With many smartphones using high-quality accelerometer/gyroscope sensors, the groundwork had been laid for Google’s Cardboard - really no more than a cheap set of plastic lenses set at the right distance from a smartphone screen. Everything else about the Cardboard experience happened inside the smartphone - because the smartphone suddenly had the right suite of sensors to generate a head-tracking display.
Theoretically, Google’s Cardboard should give you the same smooth virtual reality experience as Samsung’s Gear VR. But it’s like chalk and cheese: Cardboard does the job, but it always feels as though you’re fighting the hardware, where Gear VR feels as comfortable as an old shoe.
The reason for that lies with the sensors built into Gear VR. Oculus CTO John Carmack worked with Samsung to specify an accelerometer/gyroscope sensor suite that could feed Samsung's flagship Galaxy S6 smartmobe with a thousand updates a second. The average sensors, on a typical smartphone - even the very powerful Galaxy S6 - won’t come anywhere near that.
Head tracking can only be as good as the sensors used to track the head. The proof of this is the difference between Galaxy S6 in Cardboard, and Galaxy S6 in Gear VR - try both and see for yourself.
This is one bleeding edge in the smartphone sensor arms race. Within the next eighteen months, every high-end smartphone will specify incredibly sensitive and fast accelerometers and gyroscopes. Smartphones work well both in the palm of your hand and when mounted over your eyes. Every major manufacturer will have their own Gear VR-like plastic case for wearing their latest top-of-the-line handset. Except at the very high end - the province of serious gamers and information designers - smartphones and VR will become entirely interchangeable.
[...] Back during the Cold War, the Soviets were caught out shining laser beams onto the windows at the White House, reading voices out of the reflections. The White House responded by pointing speakers at their windows, playing music just loud enough to drown out any other signal. We may need a new app for our smartphones, one that keeps just enough music piping out its speaker to confound anyone using our newly sensitive accelerometers against us.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Thursday January 28 2016, @07:46PM
the conjunction of Moore’s Law and Steve Jobs made these sensors cheap and abundant.
actually, what happened was a number of critical MEMS patents expired and the fabrication technology was refined. some newer patents are still tightly held which is part of why getting an optical switch is so damn expensive.
Head tracking can only be as good as the sensors used to track the head. The proof of this is the difference between Galaxy S6 in Cardboard, and Galaxy S6 in Gear VR - try both and see for yourself.
this is true but it has nothing to do with MEMS sensor. CastAR's tracking technology is submillimeter accurate because it tracks static sources of nIR light. unlike MEMS sensors, light tracking doesn't suffer from gradual drift.
We may need a new app for our smartphones, one that keeps just enough music piping out its speaker to confound anyone using our newly sensitive accelerometers against us.
or just don't use one. there aren't any technologies unique to smartphones; you can use separate devices.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Friday January 29 2016, @12:26AM
+1 to that. If we want to credit Jobs, why not throw in the Wii (which was released several months earlier, sold like hotcakes, and the controllers for which included accelerometers)?
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 29 2016, @12:52AM
The smartphone business is a lot larger than the Wii business, and Apple included an accelerator in the original iPhone.
Also, the smartphones in question are what are being used to enable Google Cardboard anyway, not Wiimotes or whatever.
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(Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday January 28 2016, @08:48PM
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday January 29 2016, @12:45AM
They only need to be smart enough to be addictive, and no functionality is needed beyond that point, which is why no one is eager to port all existing free software to those platforms, however trivial that would be.
the fuck are you talking about? there are multiple free X servers for android that you can download already and use all the X based APIs. the reason you don't have "all existing free software" on Android is because they aren't designed for touchscreens. seriously, that makes as much sense as using windows programs on an x86 based smartphone.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday January 29 2016, @04:21PM
I want all shell utils, starting with GNU userland; I want all dev tools: compilers, interpreters, and documentation tools like LaTeX; I want all servers, and in particular httpd... Scratch it, I just want an option to run a complete free stack based on Linux kernel. I am not even talking about X, even though there is plenty of development lately in that area as well, and I mean specifically the touch screen. All of the above is trivial to implement. Trivial. What Android backers did was actually harder, and the result is a piece of crap, because their main objective was to avoid GPLv3, and pass the overhead on to the users. All they needed to do was pump some cash into Wayland, but instead they just wrote their own stack, which looks like a limbless torso, when you compare it to a healthy GNU/Linux individual.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday January 29 2016, @10:59PM
They only need to be smart enough to be addictive, and no functionality is needed beyond that point, which is why no one is eager to port all existing free software to those platforms, however trivial that would be.
original goalpost.
the reason you don't have "all existing free software" on Android is because they aren't designed for touchscreens. seriously, that makes as much sense as using windows programs on an x86 based smartphone.
goal score.
I just want an option to run a complete free stack based on Linux kernel.
ending goalpost moves. [youtube.com]
you should be embarrassed.
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday January 29 2016, @11:45PM
Strange, I don't feel anything besides being perplexed by what you are trying to say. Can you, may be, put your argument in a paragraph form, instead of coughing up individual words, seemingly in reference to some kind of ball game?
What I am saying makes perfect sense. What I am asking for is so trivial, it was done almost in full already by the Maemo team, which cobbled together a Debian-based distro for Nokia N900. What you are saying above makes not a lick of sense. How can the presence of touchscreen be an impediment to porting the existing GNU/Linux stack? Why have you decided to ignore my specific reference to the command-line userland, which is what I really want most of all? Does the touchscreen make that a non-starter too somehow?
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday January 30 2016, @01:47AM
Strange, I don't feel anything besides being perplexed by what you are trying to say. Can you, may be, put your argument in a paragraph form, instead of coughing up individual words, seemingly in reference to some kind of ball game?
watch the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeswYJgf5mM [youtube.com]
Why have you decided to ignore my specific reference to the command-line userland, which is what I really want most of all?
when you wrote "Scratch it, I just want" it negated everything you wrote before that.
How can the presence of touchscreen be an impediment to porting the existing GNU/Linux stack?
why do you think you can't install GNU/Linux on a smartphone?