Cellular phone users in the United States and Japan now can have motion applications capability, thanks to GestureTek Mobile and its EyeMobile Engine.

Ed Fowler, director of business development at GestureTek (www.gesturetekmobile.com), says the technology has been picked up in the United States by Alltel, Cellular South and Verizon. In the United States, the gesture-recognition software is available on devices operating on Microsoft’s Mobile 6 Platform. There are about 30 handsets that use the BREW platform (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) in North America. Symbian and Linux platforms also are supported, as well as Windows Mobile 5 and 6 and certain variants of Java, notably the one used by DoKoMo.

The technology has been available for the past six months in Japan with the FOMATM 904i series from DoCoMo. The Japanese are well ahead of the US market. Fowler says the phones in Japan can handle a variety of games and such practical tools as the Tokyo subway map. A company called Genki came out with 35 applications the day DoKoMo launched the 904i. The 905 version is expected out any time with six handsets in the lineup.

Fowler says there are six new handset manufacturers who are testing right now. “We’ll be north of 100 applications,” he promises. For a look at some of the games check out these links:

http://www.gesturetekmobile.com/videos/gesturetekmobile.wmv

http://docomo2.jp/top.html#tsuchiya*bowling

http://www.genkimobile.jp/i_chokkan/index.html

The EyeMobile Engine is completely in software (using optical sensing from the phone’s camera), thus it requires no MEMS and no accelerometer, Fowler notes.

Domestically, GestureTek Mobile is talking to all of the usual suspects, including Sprint and AT&T. Many other cell phone companies – in countries ranging including Guam, Brazil, New Zealand, Korea, Italy and Bermuda are BREW participants, and thus potential users of the technology. BREW is a C and C++ based software platform. Qualcomm is the main driver in the cellular world of the BREW technology. There are over 60 gesture-controlled mobile games that users can download which are enabled by EyeMobile. Three motion trackers — dubbed shake, rock and roll – record motion input. Shake is used for shuffling MP-3 decks or rolling the dice in a game. It is a “force of motion” interface that comes to the fore whenever a frentic user-action is appropriate, company engineers say. Rock takes the standard up/down, left/right gestures and translates them into cursor movements. The unit can be flicked forward or to the side. It is the shake that would be used to answer a phone call. Roll is a joystick-type movement that lets users navigate web pages, GPS map pages, or across game screens. Turning the pages in the phone’s directory would be accomplished with roll.

By using the camera, the system achieves extremely high definition. “We’ve more precise than the Wii and, unlike the Wii that uses big motions, we require only small shakes,” Fowler says. However, it is flexible enough for some big-scale games. It has a Wii-like bowling game that correctly interprets the four-inch swings of a phone the way a Wii would interpret the four-foot arc of a rolled balling ball.

Fowler’s favorite game, however, is a boxing match. The flip phone is set on a table and the player stands about two meters away. The player’s image is picked up by the camera and projected onto the game screen as the boxing bout proceeds.

The company, with locations in Sunnyvale, CA and Toronto, Canada has an API kit for developers that allows EyeMobile-enabled applications for OTA and pre-embedded delivery to mobile devices. The API lets developers bring motion control to applications that can run the same way as traditional key-controlled interfaces navigate a screen.

“The API is easy,” Fowler says. It can be downloaded at the company’s web site. Simply by signing the usual disclaimers and use agreements, a developer can dig into the system and start to develop motion applications.