Anticipating your (almost) every need

A team at the MIT Media Lab is building Graspables, a technology based on the idea that people shouldn't need to flip through menus or push lots of buttons to get a gadget to be a camera, a phone, or a gaming device. Instead, gadgets should be smart enough to know what the user expects, based on the many physical cues that people automatically give when they simply pick up a device.

"It's more the notion that a device can figure out what you want it to do," by picking up on the way a person is holding that device, said V. Michael Bove Jr., who directs the consumer electronics laboratory at the Media Lab. "Wouldn't it be nice if when I took a phone out of my pocket, it could read my mind?"

Bove and a former student, Brandon Taylor, developed a system that is sensitive to the way people grasp an object, using a network of sensors that can detect the phone's orientation - not only, for example, whether it's being held upright or sideways, as the Apple iPhone does, but how a person's fingers are wrapped around its surface.

They began with a rectangular object - dubbed "the bar of soap" - that uses data from dozens of sensors built into the block to automatically flip into different modes, depending on how it's being held. Responding to one grasp, it was a camera; to another, a remote control; another, a cellphone.

For their next project, they developed a gaming device, a baseball fitted with sensors that can detect both how the ball is gripped and the user's throwing motion. That makes it a natural and intuitive input device for a baseball video game that allows a player to pitch a slider or a curve ball.

But the researchers see the new interface as more than just a gimmick. Ultimately, they think devices should be able to read all the signals people unconsciously and automatically send with their bodies - information that is now mostly ignored by consumer electronics devices.

The idea has taken root beyond the MIT lab.

"I think these kind of graspable interfaces are very much needed, and do provide a much more intuitive interface," said Dinesh K. Pai, a computer science professor at the University of British Columbia. "A lot of our brain is wired up to manipulate physical objects with our hands, and a graspable, tangible interface like this makes a whole lot of sense."

Pai has developed a similar prototype sensitive to people's grasp, called Tango. Another group, at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, has been working on similar technology.

Bove can't disclose which companies have approached him with interest in integrating his technology into their products. But he thinks the technology could be useful in many unusual arenas, enabling smarter mobile devices, creating innovative video game controllers, or even power tool safety locks.

A tool might be calibrated to flip on only when it was being held properly, for example. Golfers might benefit from clubs that coach a player on the proper grip.

"The much broader question behind all this . . . is can you incorporate a significant amount of sensing and pattern recognition into small, inexpensive consumer products?" said Bove, who thinks the answer is yes.

Marlene Bourne, president of Bourne Research LLC, a market research firm that focuses on emerging technologies, said she has been paying attention to such innovations, including electronic skins that can sense heat and cold. Or technology, already making it into the marketplace, that tells a device what orientation it is in, or whether it is moving.

"The sensor technologies for these smart interfaces have been established," Bourne said.

Now, it's a matter "of taking these sensor technologies and using them in a completely different way - creating these smart interfaces, these smart products."

Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.