Microsoft touts Windows 8 sensor support

SOFTWARE REDEVELOPER Microsoft has outlined the way Windows 8 will use sensors to enable users to have greater physical input to PC and tablet devices.

Microsoft is betting that its upcoming Windows 8 operating system will end up on tablets and that means taking input from a multitude of sensors. With typical Microsoft marketing hyperbole, the firm labeled this as 'sensor fusion' where a number of sensors are correlated to create what Microsoft calls "a 9-axis sensor fusion".

Microsoft's Windows 8 will support accelerometers, gyrometers, magnetometers, a compass, an inclinometer and a device orientation sensor. The fact is most portable devices already have the majority of those sensors and both Apple's IOS and Google's Android already provide access to these sensors through application programming interfaces.

While Microsoft's sensor support is nothing particularly new, the firm said the differences will come in how the captured data is used. Gavin Gear, a product manager on Microsoft's device connectivity team said, "The "magic" of sensor fusion is to mathematically combine the data from all three sensors to produce more sophisticated outputs, including a tilt-compensated compass, an inclinometer (exposing yaw, pitch, and roll), and more advanced representations of device orientation. With this kind of data, more sophisticated apps can produce fast, fluid, and responsive reactions to natural motions."

The fittingly surnamed Gear showed an example of how little code is needed to access sensors through Windows 8. The eight line Javascript code was impressive in its brevity and a development board is already available for developers to purchase from ST Microelectronics.

Although Gear's blog post shows that Windows 8 will provide a comparable level of support for sensors as the current generation of other smartphone and tablet operating systems, whether that will be enough to attract punters is unclear. µ