Everyone is on the move. And a Houston, Texas-based firm believes it has the tilt-to-navigate technology that manufacturers need to enable products for the PDA and smart phone market. They’ve actually had the technology for some time – but the market and the pricing are finally coming together to make a better business case for their tilt-to-navigate technology.

We mentioned RotoView’s European patent win here, and we’ve since had a chance to chat with the company’s sales director. Here’s what he had to say:

RotoView from Innoventions, Inc. provides an intuitive way to scroll and navigate around the display of any small hand-held device, including PDAs, MP3 players and smart phones, by changing the orientation of the device or tilting it in the direction the screen needs to be scrolled. RotoView senses the changes in the spatial orientation of the device, dynamically controlling the display’s view.

RotoView can work with dual-axis or tri-axis accelerometers as the orientation sensors. While tri-axis accelerometers provide better movement tracking information, RotoView does not require one-to-one correspondence between orientation changes and the display navigation, thus it can use lower accuracy (and lower cost) sensors.

“We see two important trends,” says Scott LaRoche, director of sales for Innoventions. “First, smart phone manufacturers have a stronger incentive today to add sophistication to their products in order to further differentiate them from the competition. The success of the iPhone shows that customers are ready to pay for new features.

“Second, the cost of accelerometers has dropped significantly, allowing manufacturers to add this feature to their smart phone designs,” LaRoche says.

It is the company’s good fortune that, now that these sensors are much cheaper, manufacturers are starting to use these accelerometers in ways that are related to the RotoView technology.
“We believe that combining RotoView with touch-screen navigation will eliminate many of the cumbersome switches and buttons currently required,” LaRoche says. “Motioning” a device is more intuitive than pressing a button, he points out. Similarly, RotoView view navigation can enhance voice activated devices. “It will be much easier to navigate the view by tilting than by saying ‘left, left, right, up,…’” he says.
RotoView can also use MEMS gyroscopes and can also be augmented with magnetometers. However, accelerometers are significantly lower in cost and therefore the sensor of choice, LaRoche says.

If the user is mobile in a shaky environment (say on an ATV or in a tractor bumping across a field), the device can alternate between “fixed” and “navigation” modes. Since RotoView does not use one-to-one mapping between the orientation and the amount of new navigation, the process can be dynamically fine-tuned so that environment noise may be cancelled out.

“We recognize that there are some environments in which RotoView will not work,” LaRoche says. “Here we should point out that like in any other view navigation technique, there are other methods to navigate (button, voice, touch) in harsh conditions.”
While new on the market, the RotoView is not really new technology. The concept was introduced as GyroView about 10 years ago and received a patent five years ago in the United States.

“RotoView technology evolved in the late 90s,” LaRoche explains. “We received our first US patent (number 6,466,198) in 2002 and our second US patent (number 6,933,923) was awarded in 2005.
“GyroView is the original name for our technology,” he continues. “Since RotoView and its unique algorithms rely more on accelerometer technology than gyroscope technology, we changed the name to RotoView in 2003 to better reflect what it does.”

RotoView technology would likely be integrated at the main chip set level of a hand-held device. A minimal sensor, two A/D channels and a software driver are all that are required for mass production implementation.

LaRoche emphasizes that these sensors have dropped dramatically in price. “Combined with the increased processing power already available in most smart phone platforms, the cost to add RotoView navigation is relatively minor when compared to even a few years ago,” he says. As an added benefit, since the sensor would be built into the smart phone, it is available for other tasks (i.e., Apple’s iPhone, which relies on a sensor to tilt the display 90 degrees.)

Innoventions has developed an evaluation system (part number INN-8778), which they make available for $195. No NDA is required. The evaluation system includes a fully assembled board for the RotoView sensor module, a Windows-based software package that allows you to interface the module to your PC and emulate the hand-held display, and a flexible USB cable.

The company is a private corporation fully owned by David Y. Feinstein, company president and CEO. The company was started in 1984, and like most companies of yore, was run for its first two years out of Feinstein’s garage.

The company is actively seeking large manufacturers who are interested in licensing RotoView technology or purchasing the patent portfolio outright. A number of experimenters have purchased the firm’s evaluation kit. “These include personal users and developers within major companies,” LaRoche says.