On Wired.com, an article appeared talking about a new way to answer the phone. Scratching seems to be the new way to navigate your iPhone. “The sound of a fingernail raking across a table or a board may be enough to drive most people crazy. But get past that annoyance and it could become a way to answer your phone, silence a call or turn up the volume.” Wired.com says.
It should work like this: you have your phone in your pocket and someone calls you, but you don’t have the chance to take your phone out of your pocket to answer the call. But there’s another way to answer it. Just scratch your jeans at where your phone is, to answer the phone. Almost every surface works. Only glass and super smooth objects will not work.
Harrison is one of the researchers of this new technology. He says:
Scratch Input works by isolating and identifying the sound of a fingernail dragging on an area.
All the sound happening in the environment like people putting coffee cups on the table, cars going by or children screaming, we know what frequencies they are in.
It makes it easy for us to throw away all the other acoustic information and just listen to what your nail sounds like.
A fingernail on a surface produces a frequency between 6000 Hz and 13,000 Hz. Compare that to voice, which is typically in the range of 90 Hz to 300 Hz, or noise from a refrigerator compressor or air conditioning hum, which is in the range of 50 Hz or 60 Hz.
Scratch Input also supports simple gesture recognition. Tracing the letter ‘S,’ for instance produces an acoustic imprint that the system can be trained to identify. The idea has its limitations. For instance, many letters that are written differently, sound very similar such as M, W, V, L, X or T. Scratch Input cannot accurately distinguish between these gestures. The system can respond with about 90 percent accuracy.
In the video below you can see how scratching works on different objects.
What do you think? Could this be a handy way to answer the phone?
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\\ tags: iPhone, navigating, scratching
not bad at all