Smarter 3D in-air
mice are the forte of Hillcrest Labs, which made its name in motion control
technology by creating software for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).
Now the company has its own 3D controller—called the Loop—available directly to consumers, as well as
open-source software for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
The Consumer
Electronics Association reports that more than 7 million U.S.
households have already connected a personal
computer to their home television sets. Companies like Logitech have
already
licensed Freespace motion control technology to create 3D in-air
controllers,
but now Freespace creator Hillcrest Laboratories (Rockville, Md.) has a
smarter idea for TVs connected to PCs—its own specialized 3D
controller called the Loop Pointer: In-Air
Mouse for TV.
"We've designed
the Loop pointer for the growing number of consumers
who connect their PC or Mac to a TV," said Chad Lucien, vice president of
Freespace Products at Hillcrest Labs. "The Loop is a unique Freespace mouse that lets users
control an on-screen cursor with the flick of wrist."
The key to the Loop is its use of both a three-axis
accelerometer and a three-axis gyroscope, both cast onto tiny silicon chips
using micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) technology. Accelerometers were
made famous as the triggers for automobile air bags—the first
"killer" application for MEMS technology. The microscopic mechanical
actuators on the accelerometer chip were the only sensing elements that were
fast enough to fire an air bag in the required millisecond time frame.
Since then
accelerometers have become standard equipment on consumer devices such as the
iPhone, where it senses the motion of rotating the screen from portrait to
landscape orientation, and the Nintendo Wii for its "nunchuk" style
video game controller.
However, an
accelerometer only senses motion, so Nintendo had to add infrared sensors to
sense its controller's absolute location in space. Now, however, MEMS
gyroscopes are taking over the function of sensing your location in space for
the next-generation of smarter 3D in-air controllers.
A gyroscope uses an internal
rotating reference frame to track the absolute location of a controller using
the Coriolis effect. Normal-sized gyroscopes work like a rotating bicycle wheel
that "wants" to stay upright, creating an opposing force to changes
in position that can be sensed. Given a starting position, a gyroscope can tick
off precisely how much a device has been moved and in what direction.
OEMs can now create
their own 3D in-air controllers based on Hillcrest's Freespace technology using
its newly announced open-source software library called "libfreespace"
and its Freespace
Reference Kit, which include a PC board housing the accelerometer and
gyroscope MEMS chips. The new library supports the Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP,
Windows Vista and Windows 7.0 operating systems.
