Your Mobile Phone can Detect Earthquakes
Was it just you
or did the ground really shake? Click to Download Your iPhone, iPad and most newer mobile
phones can work as basic seismometers, the same instrument that is used to
measure the magnitude of earthquakes and volcanoes. You don’t need to install
any apps, just the built-in web browser would suffice.
OK,
try this. Launch Google Chrome or the Safari browser on your mobile phone
(or tablet) and then open this page.
You should see a continuously moving waveform but if you slightly shake or tilt
your mobile device, simulating seismic activity, the graph will capture
these movements in real-time much like a seismograph.
The seismic intensity will
vary depending on how vigorously (or slowly) you are shaking the phone (see the
following screenshot) and will also change based on the orientation of the
device. And you’ll be surprised to learn that this basic seismograph is written
using simple JavaScript.
Most newer mobile devices
have built-in accelerometers and gyroscopes and as you move the physical hardware,
the changes in the orientation of the device and acceleration are detected by
the browser which are then mapped into the seismograph.
The
orientation and motion data are in turn captured by the HTML5 Download DeviceOrientation and DeviceMotion events of the browser. This
works mostly on mobile devices but if you are using Google Chrome on the
desktop, you can turn on the Accelerator option under Sensors inside Chrome Dev
Tools to
simulate motion.
Update:
The code was originally published on isthisanearthquake.com in 2011 but the
domain is no longer available. A mirror is located on ctrlq.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment