A 3D joystick for mobile phones

At Ceatec, Japan’s largest gadget and IT showed Japanese telecom company, KDDI, showed a low cost 3D joystick from mobile phones. The system consists of a piece of hardware mounted over a cellphone’s camera and the accompanying software on the handset. The hardware unit is basically a spring with a magnet on the bottom that allows it to attach to a phone’s camera. It can be easily attached and removed. Underneath the top of the spring are two squares that the camera focuses on. The software can track these squares as users move the spring side to side, up and down, and in and out, allowing control on XYZ axis. For example if a user push down on the spring, the software could interpret that as a mouse click or could zoom in on a photo or map. The unit can also be rotated which can control the rotation of say, a picture. The company had on display two different applications for use with the technology, one gaming application and another one to view photos. Once commercially available, the spring unit will cost a hundred yen or about a dollar and twelve cents and can be bought through mobile phone stores. After two years of development, the software is complete but it won't be on the market for about another month according to an engineer. It will first be available in Japan through KDDI. An engineer said that they may license the technology to NTT DoCoMo or SoftBank and may also make it available internationally. At Ceatec 2009, I’m Nick Barber, IDG News Service.

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