Microsoft's Windows 8 on tablets will utilize hardware sensors in a number of ways, perhaps none more important than apps.
Microsoft's
upcoming Windows 8 will appear on both traditional PCs and tablets. However, as
the company gears up to release the operating system's beta in February,
followed by the final version sometime in the second half of 2012, it's
increasingly clear that tablet functionality is a prime concern-a sea change
from Windows 7, an OS whose interoperability with tablets often felt like an
afterthought.
In
order to optimize Windows 8's functionality on tablets, Microsoft's Windows
teams are employing sensors in a variety of ways: not only to adjust screen
brightness to compensate for ambient light conditions and rotate the elements
on the screen to match the tablet's orientation, but also to enhance apps.
That
last one is particularly important, given Microsoft's desire to transform
Windows 8 into a viable tablet competitor to Apple's iPad. The operating system
will feature a mobile-applications store familiar to anyone who's used either
Apple's App Store or Google's Android Marketplace; Microsoft has spent the past
few months encouraging developers to think about creating apps for the
platform, arguing that Windows' built-in audience is potentially a very
lucrative one.
"Initially,
some thought that the need for such sensors was scoped to very few apps, such as
specialized games," Gavin Gear, a manager of the Device Connectivity team,
wrote in a Jan. 24 posting on the
Building
Windows 8 blog. "But the more we examined the 3D motion and
orientation sensing problem, the more we realized that applications are much
more immersive and attractive if they react to the kind of motion humans can
easily understand, such as shakes, twists, and rotations in multiple dimensions."
Hence,
Microsoft's
requirement for its hardware partners that any Windows 8 tablet feature a
performance-calibrated combination of gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer and
magnetometer. "Combining the input of multiple sensors to produce better
overall results is a process we call sensor fusion," Gear wrote. "The
'magic' of sensor fusion is to mathematically combine the data from all three
sensors to produce more sophisticated outputs."
Active
sensors also drain power and impact system performance, which led Microsoft to
tinker with ways to minimize both. As a result, most sensor fusion data processing
occurs at the hardware level, sparing the main CPU from having to burn power
and cycles in order to wrestle with algorithms. In addition, Gear added, "We
implemented powerful filtering mechanisms that we tied directly to the needs of
sensor apps running at any given point of time," a decision that meant "sensor
data is only sent up the stack at the rate that apps need that data, and no
faster."
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