Have you ever played a tilt game like Doodle Jump on your smart phone? Or boxed someone on the Wii? Or danced with your friends using your Xbox Kinect? Well, unless your name is Wilson and you’ve been stuck on an island for the past 5 years, you’ve probably been exposed to motion sensing and tracking technology.
Of course motion sensing systems are not new. They have been used for decades in industrial, military and aerospace applications. But recent advances in fabrication technology, processing performance and software algorithms have made these systems available at low cost and for mass market use. So now you can put sensors in your favorite pair of sneakers to track your running performance. Or wave a remote control in the air to move a cursor on a television set. Or even know when your significant other has left the toilet lid up.
The use of motion in natural user interfaces, health, sports, games, and entertainment is becoming ubiquitous. Motion works because it is intuitive and natural. People use motion everyday whether to wave hello to a friend, point at something interesting or just plain walk and chew gum. And so if you’ve ever wondered about the technology behind motion, you’ve come to the right place.
Making Motion is a new blog from Hillcrest Labs, where we aim to make sense of motion. Our goal is to demystify motion sensing technologies and help you understand how to build valuable and usable products that incorporate motion. And we don’t expect you to be an applied physicist to read this blog either. Mentions of Euler’s Theorem and Discrete Cosine Transforms are off limits – although you may see the occasional stray reference to a quaternion or two.
So literally Making Motion is “Everything you wanted to know about motion but were afraid to ask.” Speaking of which, don’t be afraid to. If there are topics you’d like to see covered or a question you’ve always wanted answered, please follow up in the comments or reach out to us on twitter @makingmotion.
Enjoy!