Cellphone's slosh and rattle reveal its contents
Movie CameraSpeaker

* 18:00 27 November 2007
* NewScientist.com news service
* Tom Simonite


Software transforms a phone's message inbox or battery life into box of balls or a virtual liquid fuel tank that sound and feel like the real thing when shaken

Cellphone users could soon tell when their handset is running low on juice or laden with new messages simply by reaching into their bag or pocket and giving it a quick shake.

A new system uses a phone's speaker and vibrator to make a device feel and sound like it contains liquid when it is running out of power. The same technique can be used to indicate when new messages have arrived, by simulating the sense of balls rattling around inside a box.

Both tricks let a user check the state of their device quickly and without having to actually look at it. A video (top, right) shows the system – dubbed Shoogle after a Scots-English word meaning to shake – being demonstrated.

"It allows you to feel and hear the state of your phone, instead of having to look," says John Williamson at Glasgow University researcher who developed the system with colleagues Rod Murray-Smith and Stephen Hughes.
Varied feedback

To represent number of messages in a phone's inbox, Shoogle models the movement of the equivalent number of balls, as if anchored by a spring inside a box.

And different sounds could be set to correspond to different people, says Williamson. The sounds used range from metallic clinks (.wav format) to wooden thuds (.wav format).

Similarly, Shoogle lets you "feel" the amount of battery power left in the cellphone, by having the phone simulate a reducing volume of liquid sloshing (.wav format) inside a virtual container.

A phone running the software knows when it is being shaken by using accelerometers to sense the handset's movement. The software has so far been tested on a PDA with accelerometers attached and on Nokia phones with the devices built in.
Increased sophistication

As more phones with accelerometers are released for sale, Williamson expects to see more novel ideas that make use them. "Nokia has released a programming kit to help people develop software to use the accelerometers in their phones, making applications easier to develop," he says.

Informal user testing suggests people get on well with the idea, but larger-scale tests are planned, Williamson says. "We may also make a release of the software publicly," he adds.

The team also hopes to make the system more sophisticated. "We can discriminate between shaking in different directions," explains Williamson, "so left-to-right could check for just high-priority messages and another direction for other messages."

Shoogle was presented at the Computer/Human Interaction 2007 conference held in California in 2007.