How about just simple everyday uses? Automatically turning off the screen saver when you sit down and reach for the keyboard? Or shuts off the screen when you walk away? It would seem to me the best use of such technology would be integrating into human/computer interactions…

Posted at 2:15 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by William Deacon

Might be useful when the PC is being used as a controller function. For example, inside a darkened observatory, controlling a telescope. When you approach it, detailed control functionality is displayed. When you’re away, at the scope, large-text displays of the scope’s coordinates and and any imaging it’s doing. It could also control its red-light-screen brightness.

Posted at 2:21 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Barry Smith

Im with william deacon on this one, it’d be great if my computer at work locked it self when I got up and walked away. At work people are always forgetting to lock their computer when they walk away, this would be a nice safe gaurd.

Posted at 2:25 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Dan

It could also be used for measuring how long your penis is(how close it is to computer)

Posted at 2:37 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by jarza

how about playing music or playing a game… here is a pretty interesting hack doing exactly those 2 things:
http://zevv.nl/play/code/ultrasonic-theremin/

Entirely Software (Pure Data)!!! No Arduino or Maxbotix sonar needed.

Posted at 2:44 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by dano

I like this, must see it put into computer screens :)

Posted at 2:45 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by nubie

I third William Deacon.

1. Close to the screen, screen saver turns off and computer becomes active.
2. Near the computer, data screen comes up, with large type clock, maybe a news or stock feed, various status indicators.
3. Not within the field of vision, monitor turns off and computer goes to sleep (or some other low-power mode).

Posted at 2:46 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by gomi

theremin ftw

Posted at 2:47 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by tulcod

to further the idea of locking it when your away. you could set it up like WOL so when you get close it turns on. or you could make a portable version hooked up to a netbook and lay carpet or whatever haha

Posted at 2:53 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by dustin

to measure my penis

Posted at 2:55 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Mouserz

Its not very cost effective for a simple proximity sensor.

Posted at 3:34 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by az1324

If it can detect multiple people at a time, the distance detection mechanism could trigger an ALT-Tab if you boss walks in on you playing a video game at work or your girlfriend walks in while you’re looking at…

Posted at 3:50 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Sam

I was thinking of using this in a more active sense.

Combined with a webcam to recognize certain hand gestures, use the ultrasound range finder so I can manipulate objects on the screen with my hands.

Posted at 3:54 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Name

Lot’s of good ideas.

If anyone can do Windows Dev. and would like to collab on this as a fun side project, hit me up.

Twitter: joshuamc
e-mail: goodespeler@gmail.com

Posted at 3:55 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Joshua McGinnis

USe it to set the zoom on a webpage : the farther you are, the bigger the text.
Always readable !

Posted at 4:36 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by g3n

jarza, mouserz… I don’t think it can measure distances that small.. it appears the distance is measured in inches, anyway

Posted at 5:06 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Alex

A more effective zoom then that multitouch “separate the lips” bs

Posted at 5:49 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by blizzarddemon

@alex, jarza, mouserz,

it’s accurate up to 5 inches and has a 1 inch resolution.

date sheet:
http://www.maxbotix.com/uploads/LV-MaxSonar-EZ2-Datasheet.pdf

Posted at 6:39 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Joshua McGinnis

How is this a “hack”? All I see is a simple distance sensor calibration. What happened to the quality of the posts on this site?

Posted at 6:55 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by Dan

YOU ARE THE CANCER THAT IS KILLING /B/.. uh i mean hackaday. so shut it.

aaanyway, I’d use it to know if someone is sneaking up behind me, point it over my shoulder.

Posted at 7:01 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by hum4n

what happened to the quality of comments here

Posted at 7:39 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by alu

a hack would be interfacing Ultrasonic sensor from old discarded Polaroid camera.

Posted at 7:49 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by rasz

Letters and graphics can become smaller when someone get closer to screen

Posted at 10:11 pm on Mar 26th, 2009 by pavalos

this is what i been looking for. a prank im going to do with my friends, but it requires it knowing if someone is actually in front of my comp. have a number generator count down, and if ne of my friends gets close to the computer, it will start the generator count down…. i can only think of evil things to do with this, sorry everyone, but I cant see any good, just evil, and fun from this proximity hack.

Posted at 12:41 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by cyberpunk64bit

….also, why cant someone have a security lock on there computer that only accepts admin/users face to login to the computer? (ok, i will stop rambling.)

Posted at 12:44 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by cyberpunk64bit

How is this deserving of a post on hackaday?

Posted at 1:08 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by goodnews

shit, why does there have to be some whinging asshole with the same name as me?

i like this idea; have you thought about using it to control zoom? move your face closer to the machine to zoom in, further away to zoom out. might be quite cool in google earth or something.

i wrote some code earlier this year that uses face detection to let you control the mouse (and thus look around in a FPS game) by pointing your face left,right,up and down; it might go quite well with something similar!

Posted at 1:20 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by dan

I’d use it to sound an alarm or possibly electro-shock myself every time my face got closer than arms length from the monitor- I don’t need glasses but staring at a monitor from a foot away all day can’t help.

Ditto the wol (\/\/0L_?) ideas, it could automatically put your computer into “away” mode- power off monitor, pause music player or anything else that needs pausing, crank up your waiting torrents/processing/seti@home or whatever if you are away for more than a minute or so.

Or it could just play the “Are you coming back?” and “there you are” portal turret sounds :)

Posted at 3:50 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by PKM

Using an external ultrasound sensor? Meh.
Now if this was done using laptops internal speakers and mic, that would be a worthy hack.

Posted at 4:01 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by saadin

@saadin: with the mic?! You’re seeing to much Macgyver, how could you use a sound sensor to detect proximity? Unless you require the person to shout when (s)he approaches :P

But most laptops now have cameras, you could probably do something very similar with only motion detection and face size identification.

Posted at 5:02 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by IceBrain

I’m no expert on cell phones but isnt there similar technology in use already (behold/itouch/iphone)

Posted at 6:42 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by wh00tyw00

eye exam

Posted at 7:12 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by kerry bill

This is being used already in robotic toys.

Posted at 7:33 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by haounomiko

What would be cool is to control volume of an audio player with this. You’d set the volume to a comfortable room listening level. Then, if you walk away from PC, the level would go up a bit so you can hear from your kitchen. Then when you sit back in front of the PC, the volume would level down.

Posted at 7:43 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by stereoharold

i like all the ideas being thrown around. i think that what it boils down to is:
>if user is in front of computer then
>get distance
>[distance related action]
>else
>[idle action]
i could also see this being used as a way to save electricity (>ahem<), seeing as any ad these days is geared for green.

(btw- i, too, am a bit puzzled as to why this is on “hack-a-day”)

Posted at 8:49 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by irab88

@hum4n

you sir, are and idiot

but seriously though, you could probably couple this with the robotic arm from the other day to make something like Stark’s assistant in Iron Man.

Posted at 8:52 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by Ynynymys

Hmmm…Interesting

Posted at 10:08 am on Mar 27th, 2009 by Weenis

Interesting, though may be useful for some things, a lot of the suggested can also be done with a built-in cam in some laptops. Which means the software can be adapted to existing hardware already out there. Except for the telescope application, where in darkness using a IR to light up the scene for the camera may interfere with viewing of the stars.

Now take a servo, put the system on that and rotate it around, and you have a cool little sonar(radar) fuction, you could then plot it out. Add one more servo to give you a controlled Y axis to move the beam up and you could do a 3D plot of your envelopment. Kind of spiral scan. Would have possible uses in robotics to chart out your environment before proceeding.

Posted at 1:04 pm on Mar 27th, 2009 by Roman D

while i also like the idea of unlocking/turning off a screensaver when you sit down, i personally find this is be a highly impractical and inefficient approach to such an idea.

currently, there is already a method of unlocking a workstation using a chip you carry on a keychain or in your wallet, and it locks when you go so far away from the the machine. similar to the newer keyless entry/start vehicles. this is also better for security reasons, obviously, unless facial recognition were a capability.

cool project though, kudos.

Posted at 2:08 pm on Mar 27th, 2009 by thetwiz

Presentation in the courtroom.

Posted at 2:29 pm on Mar 27th, 2009 by thenakedlistener

penis mesurer

Posted at 8:01 pm on Mar 27th, 2009 by jermy

i don’t know why this is such a big deal. connecting an ultrasound sensor to an arduino and making it control things on your computer is about 10 lines in the arduino sketchpad and 30 lines of processing on the computer. and the wiring is USB -> arduino, 5V/ground/analog from sensor to microcontroller.

Posted at 9:38 pm on Mar 27th, 2009 by doodoo

It would be cool to hook it up to a motion sensor camera – and then configure them both to a automated paint ball gun – have the computer calculate the proper tragectory and stuff

or just measure a penis or two

Posted at 5:54 am on Mar 28th, 2009 by mike

You guys are posting comments about how you can use this so your screen turns on or off if your around it on your computer?????well thats already been done .My alienware laptop can tell if im there in front of it or not and with facial recognition it can even tell if it is me and it will not respond to anybody else.I believe that this could be usefull for reading text at different distances becouse it can automaticly adjust the text size .If my laptop could do that i would be very happy.

Posted at 8:26 am on Mar 28th, 2009 by kris

is caleb kraft a neophyte who also just happens to be a freshman in engineering school?

caleb chooses a lot of really weak subjects — just “ooh that’s cool child’s play” stuff versus real hacks. why is this guy still writing for hackaday?!

i mean, come on — the cell phone shoe is a krafty caleb classic: http://hackaday.com/2009/02/11/cell-phone-shoe/

Posted at 9:30 am on Mar 28th, 2009 by supershwa

Just because you don’t see it as a hack does not make it a hack. Surly you can figure out how to make it work with a proxi sensor from a poloroid or without using an audrino. Its about the core idea that can be innovated upon. Use your brains and make it better or find more applications for such.

Posted at 10:14 am on Mar 28th, 2009 by Drake

@drake: I hooked a PIR motion sensor to my work PC’s parallel port ten years ago to lock the screen when I’m away and turn on the desk lamp via X10 when I log in and am at my desk. Many others have done the same with RF transponders, bluetooth MAC sniffing, cameras, and ultrasound. This isn’t novel or unique.

Posted at 9:12 pm on Mar 28th, 2009 by pokey

@pokey: Not to be offensive . . . but did you post results on the web? This is the first I’ve seen this done with results posted. Sometimes its not about how you can use it, or how new the idea is, its about the results and the documentation. Just because you have done it before does not mean there isn’t anyone who hasn’t and needs ideas for hacks. Yes it is basic, but it has potential for other uses. Think of how it could be used in a smart home or a smart car. Some people cant afford specialized equipment but still need to know how it is done so they can find a solution for their needs.

Posted at 11:43 pm on Mar 28th, 2009 by drake

Two words.
TAPE MEASURE.

Posted at 12:46 am on Mar 29th, 2009 by Ninja

the worst part about this whole thing is how easily you people are trolled

Posted at 5:07 pm on Mar 29th, 2009 by aficionado

Yet another [beneficial] side effect: chase away your cat who likes to warm oneself on the laptop keyboard. They might not like ultrasound… but, of course, that depends on actual transmitted power. Did someone test that? I haven’t a rangefinder handy. (There are of course software solutions for cats but I won’t bother unless my fluffy manages to do something nasty.)

Posted at 10:06 pm on Mar 29th, 2009 by saimhe

Is it just me or is the arduiuno an expensive and necessary component?

Posted at 11:54 pm on Mar 29th, 2009 by nc

The ultrasonic theremin posted above is super impressive!

Another technique for sensing distance from a computer is to use the frame of the computer as an electrode for capacitive sensing. If it isn’t plugged into the wall, it becomes its own ground. You need some sort of microcontroller to measure capacitance, but it doesn’t take any extra components. Here I just swapped back and forth between “ICH SEHE DICH” (I see you) and black + playing random locations in memory out to the audio:

http://vimeo.com/1690428

Posted at 11:02 pm on Mar 30th, 2009 by Kyle McDonald

I can see this being useful for those with vision problems. All they would need to do is lean in and and the text adjusts dynamically to suit their eyes’ focal point. One would need an initial calibration, but that can be easily set. Further implementation could be based on a per-user basis with settings for each user.

I can see the reverse being set too for large HDTVs. The closer you lean in, the resolution increases and text size decreases.

This would be a handy function for applications like Photoshop – lean in and you increase magnification of the image.

Posted at 9:23 am on Apr 2nd, 2009 by blueeeyesm

Stop blind people from walking into things?

Posted at 8:00 am on Apr 3rd, 2009 by me