MacSaber and Sudden Motion Sensors

Some new Apple Mac laptops and IBM Thinkpads have sudden motion sensors inside, which park the hard drive heads in the event of a fall which protects your data from being damaged. It’s being used for all sorts of things, including a way to turn your Mac into a Jedi weapon. It’s surprising how many fun uses for the sensors there are. Why not have an actual input device designed for this sort of thing? The acceleratometers (gyroscopes) can’t be too expensive now that Apple and IBM are including them in nearly all laptops. I guess that’s what Gyration has tried to do, but those are used just as mouse pointers. You need fun apps like these before it’ll take off. This is a good idea from a Slashdot comment.

Maybe we should just start putting in different types of random sensors in laptops that can pull data from the emediate environment and see what the hackers can do with them. Some suggestions:

Gyroscopes for Orientation (pitch,roll,yaw)
More accelerometers
Altimeter
GPS
External temperature,humidity, pressure
Pressure sensors (which determine how hard the user is banging on the keyboard in aggrevation).
Thermal imaging