“Twhirleds”: Spun and whirled affordances controlling multimodal mobile-ambient environments with reality distortion and synchronized lighting to preserve intuitive alignment

The popularity of the contemporary smartphone makes it an attractive platform for new applications. We are exploring the potential of such personal devices to control networked displays. In particular, we have developed a system that can sense mobile phone orientation to support two kinds of juggling-like play styles: padiddle and poi . Padiddling is spinning a flattish object (such as a tablet or board-mounted smartphone) on the tip of one’s finger. Poi involves whirling a weight (in this case the smartphone itself) at the end of a tether. Orientation of a twirled device can be metered, and with a communications infrastructure, this streamed azimuthal data can be used to modulate various distributed, synchronous, multimodal displays, including panoramic and photospherical imagery, diffusion of pantophonic and periphonic auditory soundscapes, and mixed virtuality scenes featuring avatars and props animated by real-world twirling. The unique nature of the twirling styles allows interestingly fluid perspective shifts, including orbiting “inspection gesture” virtual cameras with self-conscious ambidextrous avatars and “reality distortion” fields with perturbed affordance projection.