PhonePoint pen: using mobile phones to write in air

Abstract

The ability to note down small pieces of information, quickly and ubiquitously, can be useful. This paper proposes a system called PhonePoint Pen that uses the in-built accelerometer in mobile phones to recognize human writing. By holding the phone like a pen, an user should be able to write short messages or even draw simple diagrams in air. The acceleration due to hand gestures can be converted into an image, and sent to the user's Internet email address for future reference. We motivate the utility of such a system through simple use-cases and applications, and present the design and implementation challenges towards a functional prototype. Our early results show that the PhonePoint Pen is feasible if the user is restricted to a few simple constraints.