Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its efforts to improve the user experience with Windows 8 OS. According to a recent blog post, Microsoft is keen on leveraging the latest advances in sensor technology. Sensors that react to changes in ambient light, motion, human proximity and location are being explored to evolve the user experience.
“Adaptive brightness” feature uses ambient light sensors to dynamically control the screen brightness based on surrounding light conditions, thus improving the reading experiences and saving battery life. Automatic screen rotation which adapts the graphic display to the orientation is already provided in many smart phones. Similar features are already present in rival iOS and Android operating systems. But Microsoft is taking these to the next level –“sensor fusion”, where a combination of sensors like accelerometer, magnetometer and gyro are fused to create an experience that is greater than sum of the individual parts.
Our previous post on the focus areas of Windows 8 mentioned about the essential need of apps for the success of Windows 8 tablets. And Microsoft seems to be really focusing on this item. They are planning to expose these sensors to app developers so that they can create better sensor-enabled games and apps. Simple applications like a pedometer can use the raw data from a single sensor directly, but complex apps and games need sophisticated data and here the ‘sensor fusion’ comes to the rescue. Work is already on to provide a sensor API that is clean and simple and at the same time giving developers access to ‘fusion data’. A 9-axis sensor fusion system that was built into the Windows 8 Developer preview slate is already available online from ST Microelectronics. We can definitely expect at least a few hundreds of developers are already sharpening their apps to ‘fuse’ them better with sensors.
Check out this real life example -
Adaptive Brightness Off
Adaptive Brightness On
Incoming search terms:
- smart sensor fuzed
- tablets with sensor fusion
- windows 8 sensor fusion
- user experience windows
- technology sensors
- windows8 require sensor
- snapdragon sensor fusion
- sensor fusion phone pedometer
- pedometer in windows 8
- adaptive brightness windows 8
