TinyMotion

Camera Phone Based Interaction Methods

TinyMotion is a pure software approach that detects the movements of cell phones in real time by analyzing image sequences captured by the built-in camera. Typical movements that TinyMotion detects include - horizontal and vertical movements, rotational movements and tilt movements. As a result, a user can activate and access different functions of a phone (For example, scrolling and selecting the phone menu, Zooming in/out pictures, Moving an on-screen cursor to a given region and even gesture/handwriting input) by moving, tilting or rotating the phone.

Different from existing research work, TinyMotion does not require additional sensors (accelerometers, motion sensors), markers (barcodes, anchor symbols, dots) or external computing powers and can run on today's main-stream camera phones without hardware modifications. Even more, TinyMotion can detect camera movement reliablely under diverse background and illumination conditions.


Playing a TinyMotion Enabled Game

News

  • SHRIMP received an Honorable Mention, CHI Best Paper Award at the upcoming CHI 2010! 03/01/2010
  • SHRIMP (Small Handheld Rapid Input with Motion and Prediction) has been accepted as a full paper by the upcoming CHI 2010! 12/18/2009
  • The GUIR server hosting TinyMotion is retired this summer, TinyMotion now moved to a new server! 8/18/2008
  • TinyMotion now has an easier to remember permanent url - http://tinymotion.org ! 6/12/2008

Applications and Games

  • SHRIMP (Small Handheld Rapid Input with Motion and Prediction)
  • Motion Menu : Scrolling and Selecting Menu Items by Moving or Tilting the Phone
  • Image View : Button-Free Image/Map Viewer
  • Vision TiltText : A Remake of the TiltText Input Method Without Additional Accelerometer Hardware
  • Mobile Gesture : Gesture and Handwriting Input by Camera Phones
  • Camera Tetris : Play the Tetris Game Without Pressing Any Button
  • Camera Snake : Play this Classic Cell Phone Game by Tilting/Moving Your Phone
  • Camera BreakOut : Play this Classic Arcade Game by Tilting/Moving Your Phone

Video

Publications

  • Jingtao Wang, Shumin Zhai, John Canny, SHRIMP - Solving Collision and Out of Vocabulary Problems in Mobile Predictive Input with Motion Gesture, In ACM CHI 2010, Atlanta, Georgia, April 10 -15, 2010. (TO APPEAR) Honorable Mention, CHI Best Paper Award
  • Jingtao Wang, Shumin Zhai, John Canny, Camera Phone Based Motion Sensing: Interaction Techniques, Applications and Performance Study, In ACM UIST 2006, Montreux, Switzerland, October 15-18, 2006. PDF
  • Jingtao Wang, John Canny, TinyMotion: Camera Phone Based Interaction Methods, in alt.chi of ACM CHI 2006, Montreal, Canada, April 24-27, 2006. PDF

Contact Information

Collaborator