Gadgets (3024)

Moxia Sphere: The ultimate Apple interface

Fruit looking interface promises to change our gadget world

31 March 2009 6:41 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Moixa, the maker of the innovative USBCell batteries plans to transform the way we interact with computers with the launch of a 3D interactive multi-touch sphere that can be used to display the world, browse web pages or control interactive games.

Called Sphere, the company has just been awarded the patent on a spherical hand-held display and control device that is the size and weight of an apple.

The apple can be recharged by opening a leaf like petal, can also display an interactive world map (such as Google Earth), navigate the web or interact with applications.

According to the company, "the device supports multi-touch interactions for zoom, selection, as well as 6 degree rotational and gyroscopic actions, with particular application in interactive games or complex control situations such as interacting with a nearby 3D screen or virtual space".

The Sphere can also be collapsed, used and stored in its second form - a flat ellipsoid.

Moixa founder Simon Daniel comments, "Sphere is part of an expanding IP portfolio of geometric forms that rethink the axioms of advanced portable computing. This started with cuboid folding keyboards, through flat/extendable mice and rollable screens to cylindrical re-usable batteries, and now spherical forms".

"In the future, phones and portable computing devices reduce to input/output and power. Sphere reinvents the look and feel of the advanced portable device as we rely more on services, memory and mapping stored on the web".

Sphere is due in 2010 and is linked to the commercial availability of flexible screen materials.

The patents, filed in 2004 also disclose advanced multi-touch surface interaction and gyroscopic control benefits.