Sponsor content — Accelerometers: The chips making sense of mixed reality

This email was produced by Quartz Creative on behalf of Accenture, and not by the Quartz editorial staff. If you’ve ever counted your steps with a Fitbit, swung a Wiimote, flown a quadcopter, or tilted your phone to watch a video horizontally, then you’ve used accelerometers. The silicon sensors, just a few millimeters wide, have had sizable impact on consumer and industrial devices, enabling advances in healthcare, gaming, photography, aeronautics, and automotive safety. That influence will only, er, accelerate as AR and VR become mainstays of society and business. These accelerometer-dependent [extended reality (XR) systems are blurring physical and digital distances]( eliminating barriers to information, experience, and people. [Sponsor Accenture]( [Quartz Obsession] Accelerometers December 22, 2018 A sense of the future --------------------------------------------------------------- This email was produced by Quartz Creative on behalf of Accenture, and not by the Quartz editorial staff. If you’ve ever counted your steps with a Fitbit, swung a Wiimote, flown a quadcopter, or tilted your phone to watch a video horizontally, then you’ve used accelerometers. The silicon sensors, just a few millimeters wide, have had sizable impact on consumer and industrial devices, enabling advances in healthcare, gaming, photography, aeronautics, and automotive safety. That influence will only, er, accelerate as AR and VR become mainstays of society and business. These accelerometer-dependent [extended reality (XR) systems are blurring physical and digital distances]( eliminating barriers to information, experience, and people. Explainer How your smartphone knows ⬆️ from ⬇️ --------------------------------------------------------------- As its name suggests, an accelerometer calculates changes in an object’s acceleration. The most basic mechanical accelerometers consist of an outer casing and a ball attached to a spring. As the casing moves, the ball lags behind (inertia ftw!) and the spring stretches. The length of the spring correlates with the object’s acceleration in a particular direction. [Accenture_Obsession-Accelerometer-01] The micro-electro-mechanical (MEM) accelerometers embedded in modern electronics are more complex, but fundamentally work the same way: Tiny silicon rods bounce between a positive and negative electrode. The movement creates current, which engineers can correlate to physical acceleration. In smartphones, three MEM accelerometers track movement in three dimensions. [Accenture_Obsession-Accelerometer] Origin story Starting a movement --------------------------------------------------------------- Before they became fixtures of consumer electronics, accelerometers were used in airbag control systems. Because the sensors were able to continuously track how fast objects move, they were useful when those objects suddenly stopped, like during crashes. If the negative acceleration of an object passes a certain threshold, the accelerometer system rapidly sends a signal to deploy the car’s airbag. Increasingly stricter safety standards in the 1980s and 1990s helped spike demand for MEMS sensors. This, coupled with efficiencies in bulk micromachining in the the 80s and 90s, lowered sensor prices, which paved the way for the sensors to make their way into other devices, namely smartphones. DO A BARREL ROLL! A symphony of sensors --------------------------------------------------------------- While the accelerometer is powerful in its own right, in modern applications the device rarely works alone. Its most common companion is the gyroscope, a sensor that measures rotational velocity around the X, Y, and Z axes. Together, the two sensors track rotational movement of an object. (Modern devices also frequently include magnetometers, which smartphones use for their compass functionality.) When combined with special cameras that track positional movement, these sensors can track how an object moves in 3D space, a concept known as six degrees of freedom (6DoF). More degrees of freedom means more immersion: First-person video games, for example, have five degrees of freedom, while simple VR devices like Google Cardboard support three degrees of freedom (yaw, pitch, and roll), which is ideal for 360 videos. Full VR devices like the Oculus and HTC Vive have all six. [Accenture_Obsession-Accelerometer-2 (1)] By the digits [$5 billion]( The forecasted size of the global accelerometer and gyroscope market by 2022. [60%]( InvenSense’s percent of revenue from Apple before China-based smartphone maker Oppo acquired the motion sensor company for $1.3 billion in 2017. [32%]( The drop in the average price of MEM accelerometers from 2004 to 2015. [0.9mm^3]( : The size of mCube’s smallest three-axis accelerometer. The sensor is smaller than a grain of sand. [120 billion]( The forecasted combined revenue of VR and AR market in 2020. X-ray vision? Mixing mixed reality with medicine --------------------------------------------------------------- From surgical robotics to pacemakers, the medical industry has long loved its accelerometers. And with XR, accelerometers are going to be playing a bigger and bigger role in healthcare. In 2016, Doctor Shafi Ahmed live-streamed a surgery in 360 degrees with Google Glass, giving 13,000 students and clinicians a direct POV learning opportunity, which can be viewed in stereoscope by slotting your phone into a $15 cardboard headset. The video game industry is XR’s biggest adopter, projected to be valued at $11.6 billion by 2025. However, healthcare follows closely with a 2025 XR valuation of $5.1 billion, spurred by growing applications in surgery, diagnostic imaging, patient care, and medical education. XR’s many medical applications are a helpful signal for other industries looking to integrate VR and AR platforms into workflows. [Screen Shot 2018-12-03 at 1.56.35 PM]( Virtualize before you buy Augmented everything --------------------------------------------------------------- AR doesn’t get as much attention as VR, but its real-world applications and accessibility via smartphones have made it an easier sell for both consumers and brands. [IKEA’s Place app]( for example, lets users visualize what furniture might look like in their homes, while [Gap’s Dressing Room app]( and [The Sampler from Converse]( have brought similar functionality to clothes shopping. Cosmetics and beauty brands have also embraced AR, which lets users test beauty products before buying them. All of these applications, which use a combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes to track objects in 3D space, increase users access to key information. Fun fact! The iPhone wasn’t the first consumer device to include a accelerometer when it shipped in 2007. In 2002, [India’s Amida released the handheld Simputer]( which featured the sensor, beating out Apple by five years. DIY Faking out your Fitbit --------------------------------------------------------------- Today’s fitness trackers are smarter than your average pedometer. The devices use their own proprietary algorithms to determine whether accelerometer readings actually count as steps, reducing the chance of false positives and making it harder for users to cheat the system. But no algorithm is cheat-proof. Rogue Fitbit users have found plenty of ways to convince the devices that they’re moving more than they actually are. [Some have tied the devices to electric drills]( room fans, and even dogs, whose movements can trick the step counter algorithms. Slightly more involved (and alarming) was a recent experiment from [researchers who used the accelerometers’ resonant frequencies]( to hack a handful of consumer electronics. These “resonant acoustic injection attacks” let them manipulate the devices’ readings. In one case, they were able to convince a Fitbit tracker to register 3,000 spurious steps. Would-be Fit-fibbers be warned: By cheating your fitness tracker, you’re only cheating yourself. 🙅‍♂️ Poll How do you like your reality? [Click here to vote]( VirtualAugmentedJust vanilla for me, please If you choose to [unsubscribe]( you are unsubscribing from future sponsor content emails, not from the daily Quartz Obsession editorial email. Quartz | 675 Avenue of the Americas, 4th Fl | New York, NY 10011 | United States [Advertisement]