Sword fighting once was a very popular sport but the hazards of it hurting one or both of the participants doesn’t make it a very favorite. However, now you can indulge your courage without having to pick up a sword. You can fight with a virtual sword, thanks to a new smartphone technology from Microsoft.
This technology is essentially able to detect the movement and locality of the other smartphone, that of your opponent, when you are fighting with him. It has been created by a team at Microsoft Research and of course has a lot of other applications apart from this rather fun game.
According to a Lead Researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, Thomas Moscibroda, “There’s a lot of technology now that allows phones to connect. But if you want to enable games that have a more active flavor, then you need more. What you need is a technology that allows mobile devices to localize each other. If I move, I need to know how close your phone is next to me.”
Moscibroda and his colleagues have been able to enable sound-based smartphone localization through a new technology called FAR. It is all actually based on sound signals sent from one smartphone to the other and the correspondent measurement of the distance. The same phenomenon applies when two players play the game called SwordFight.
Another researcher on the Swordfight project says, “If you think about the fact that you could only take one measurement per second, you could have an error of 4 meters. We’ve been able to improve that, so that we can go 12 samples per second and theoretically up to 22 samples per second. On average, based on our testing, we can actually achieve within 2-centimeter accuracy. Overall, there’s really a broad applicability to it. We’re not simply talking about phones. A fundamental part of the research that we’ve done is not tied to any particular operating system or anything like that.”
Source: Microsoft Research
Courtesy: Wired
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