Blow it to Get it Excited

Have you ever played Lego Indiana Jones on the Nintendo DS?  Well, if not there is a challenge where you have to blow up a balloon, which you achieve by actually blowing into the DS!  Now, courtesy of Korean mobile company Pantech, this clever little bit of technology is being integrated into a mobile phone named – perhaps rather amusingly – the Sky Wind.

Korean software house Fantalog have perfected this system and have called it the Emotion Engine and surprisingly it needs no hardware modification, just an extra bit of software which then measures the air flow through the handset’s existing microphone.  They say it will recognise the difference between a person blowing and simply the wind, so there will be no problem using the phone on a breezy day!

The Sky Wind look a little like a Motorola V3 and with the Emotion Engine you’ll be able to change wallpaper with a blow, increase of decrease the screen brightness and take a picture with the camera.  Interestingly, it appears to mimic an accelerometer too, recognising movement of the phone, and it knows the difference between a short and long blow, so other functions could be incorporated – especially for games.

Who knows if this will catch on, or just how ridiculous one would look using the thing, but there’s no denying it’s innovative enough!  Korea is set to get the Sky Wind during February but no price or international availability is mentioned.