Air-writing application

Engineering students at Duke University have taken advantage of the accelerometers in mobile phones to create an application that enables users to write short notes in the air with their phone and have that message automatically sent to an e-mail address.

Accelerometers are the devices in phones that not only keep track of the phone's movements, but make it possible for the display screens to rotate from landscape to portrait modes depending on how the phone is rotated. These devices are always on, so there is no additional burden on the phone to use the new application.

'We developed an application that uses the built-in accelerometers in cell phones to recognise human writing,' said Sandip Agrawal, an electrical and computer engineering student at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, who with Duke graduate student Ionut Constandache developed the so-called PhonePoint Pen.

By holding the phone like a pen, a user can write short messages or draw simple diagrams in the air. The accelerometer then converts the gestures to images, which can be sent to any e-mail address for future reference.