Samsung: Your Camera is the New Mouse for Your Smartphone

Samsung is coming up with a new feature in their smartphones in which camera of your smart phone will act as its mouse. They have filed a patent application for this feature and this will alleviate problems that we face while using touch screen of our smart phones and tablets.

Problems That We Face With Touch Screen of Our Smartphones

One of a big disadvantage of touch screen device is that a lot of screen area gets invisible when we use our fingers to touch the screen. We all have faced such situation while browsing or while highlighting the text messages.

Another problem is that touch screens of our smartphones don’t work when we wear gloves. It happens because the touch screens on mobile phones are based on Capacitive sensing.

The touch screen device has an electrostatic field. Our body is conductive and when we touch the screen, the field gets distorted and an input is provided to the device.

Now gloves protect you from the cold, but also prevent the finger from distorting the field because it is a non-conductor of electricity. So the screen becomes non-responsive with gloves on. Same is for water.

How Samsung is Solving this Problem of Touch Screen

You might have used your smart phone as mouse of your laptop or computer. Samsung is using smart phone camera to control its own user interface (UI). Technically the camera is acting as mouse for your smart phone.

You don’t have to touch the screen to provide inputs and you can control it by using your fingers.

You can control your smart phone by hovering fingers in front of your smart phone camera. The camera detects your finger movements and performs the desired operation.

For example, moving your fingers up and down will scroll the page and single tap in air will perform click and double tap will work as right-click.

There are other intriguing features like you can even control your device by using your head. You can scroll a webpage by moving your head up or down.

You can turn pages of a PDF file by turning your head to left or right. If you will turn your face in left direction then it will show the previous page and if you will turn toward the right direction then it will lead you to the next page.

Moreover, you can use your feet to control your smartphones.  Yes you can. 🙂 Let suppose you are playing guitar by reading musical notes from your tablet. Then, you can scroll the musical notes by movement of your feet as your hands are busy with strings.

How Smartphone Camera Acts as Its Own Mouse

The camera module divides the screen into multiple regions as shown in the picture. Each divided region has a command associated with it.

When you hover or move your fingers in front of the user interface of your smart phone, the camera detects that and based on the command associated with the detected region, it will perform operations.

For example, if you will do a tap in air in front of chrome, it will open chrome browser for you.

Samsung will be providing lots of intriguing features in their futuristic smart phones. They are incorporating AR , providing smart battery and smart phonebook . 

They are truly heading toward an amazing smart device.