Defying Gravity: A Novel Method of Converting Screen Orientation

Abstract

Current automatic screen rotation method used for most of the mobile devices is based only on the direction of the gravity rather than a user's pose. Therefore research have been performed to find a more human-centered approach based on users' viewing directions, gestures or hand grip patterns. Among these studies, the computational complexity and power consumption were main drawbacks. In this paper, a novel method considering users' hand grip pattern was proposed by utilizing sensors on the back of the mobile phone to convert the screen orientation between horizontal and vertical. The proposed method not only reflects both users' hand grip pattern and comfortableness but also has advantages in adaptability for other flat-back mobile devices, faster computational time and lower power load in comparison to conventional methods.