WHEN Scott Forstall, a senior vice president at Apple, demonstrated a new space game for the iPhone, he let the spacecraft cruise through a field of stars for a bit. As the audience finished absorbing the look of the shooter set in a distant galaxy, he asked them, “I don't have a joystick on here, or any four-button toggle, so how do I steer?” A few seconds later, he tilted the phone just a few degrees and the ship shifted course on the screen. “We have a full three-axis accelerometer in here, so all I've got to do is move the phone around and now I'm steering it,” he said. The crowd of programmers cheered. The iPhone is not unique. Nintendo's popular Wii game console uses similar technology, and many cellphones, computers and other electronic gadgets are gaining a sensitivity to motion. Manufacturers are increasingly embedding accelerometers and other sensors into the machines, which allow them to respond to movement without waiting for their humans to push a button. Game designers and other programmers are jumping to remake user interfaces so that users can direct gadgets with a nudge, a tilt or a shake. The programmer Graham Oldfield turned his Nokia N95 cellphone into a virtual light saber by writing software that tracked the phone's movement using the built-in accelerometer. When the phone is still, it emits a low hum, but when the user waves it, the pitch and volume increase just like the weapons in the “Star Wars” movies. If the phone is abruptly stopped, it assumes it encountered something and provides a proper cracking sound. Version 1.5 of the software, available free from Oldfield's Web site (graho.wordpress.com), adds tactile feedback through the vibrating ringer, a feature Oldfield calls SaberTingle. Versions of the popular video game Snake from the 1970s are now available for iPhone and Nokia phones with accelerometers. Tilting the phone guides a snake to dinner, a process that gets harder and harder as the snake grows. Andreas Jakl and Stephan Selinger, professors at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria, transformed a Nokia N95 cellphone into a steering wheel for a radio-controlled car (www.symbianresources.com/projects). Turn the phone to the left and the car turns left. – The New York Times __
