What if we could use our phone just by squeezing it, i.e. we will squeeze our phone in particular pattern to dial different combination of numbers. In case of emergency now there is no need to open lock of smartphone and then dialing numbers or performing certain operation, now we can perform our task by not seeing smartphone also. A different pattern might turn the music on or flip a page on the screen.
Pushing the controls beyond tapping, swiping and voice commands, researchers in the US have come up with a way of making any phone pressure responsive, enabling you to control your phone with a squeeze. Developers of this technology are inspired by, The Dark Knight film, in which Batman uses smartphones to send high frequency sonar bursts.
Relying on the phone's existing hardware, ForcePhone software promises to bring the kind of pressure-sensitive control used in the iPhone 6s to any smartphone. ForcePhone offers new ways for people to command their mobile devices.
Earlier iPhone 6s has a force-sensing screen but the less expensive iPhone SE does not. No commercially available device has a pressure-sensitive body.
"You don't need a special screen or built-in sensors to do this. Now this functionality can be realized on any phone," said Kang Shin, the Kevin and Nancy O'Connor Professor of Computer Science in the U-M Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He further said, “We've augmented the user interface without requiring any special built-in sensors.”
ForcePhone works by using smartphone’s two fundamental sensors : Microphone and Speaker. The software sets the speaker to emit an inaudible tone at a frequency higher than 18 kHz, which is outside the range of human hearing. But the phone's mic can still pick up the vibration caused by the sound.
When a user presses on the screen or squeezes the phone's body in particular way then phone’s mic detect that and software respond to that input by calculating according to algorithm.
"Having expensive and bulky sensors installed into smartphones can solve every problem we have solved, but the added cost and laborious installation prevent phone manufacturers from doing it," Tung said. "Our sound-based solution can fill this gap, providing the functionality without making any hardware modification. Everything is just software."
Previously, Tung and Shin created BumpAlert, an Android application designed to warn distracted pedestrians of objects in their path, and EchoTag, which let phones tag and remember specific indoor locations and associate those places with certain modes or tasks.
The researchers will present their newest software, ForcePhone, in Singapore at MobiSys 2016, the Association for Computing Machinery's international mobile systems and applications conference on June 27-29.
