Windows 7 and Windows Sensors Technology

Ambient Light Sensors (ALU) are used to tweak the UI accordingly to the environment. Left to Right: Normal, strong light, little or no light

Windows Sensors is new and interesting technology that we will see equipped with Windows 7. These “Windows Sensors” enable your computer to adapt to the environment around you through hardware or software sensors to create new functions for your computer. To best explain how this works, take a look at this table showing the list of possible sensors and their functions:

A good example of a sensor being extremely useful is the Light sensor. The Light sensor utilizes Ambient Light Sensors (ALS) equipped with laptops, which most have today. ALS reacts with the amount of illuminance and other aspects of light such as chromacity being exposed, to effectively tweak and create a picture on the monitor screen that will suit that environment.

Suppose you are using your laptop to find your way to a restaurant. Normally, the map would look like this:

When on-the-go, the sun isn’t always necesssarily your best friend and may cause a horrible glare on your monitor, making it virtually impossible to make out what is on the screen. Fortunately, ALS will react to the sunlight and tweak the map display to something like this:

When night-time comes, the UI is optimized to use darker colors so it is easier to glance at in the dark:

If you are not totally convinced that this is effective (like I was), here’s a photo showing the feature being applied in practice:

And here’s another photo to show how effective it can be when using work-related applications on-the-go:

You can view the PDC session “Windows 7: The Sensor and Location Platform” here. Microsoft also uploaded documents with further information that may be of interest to developers.

I wasn’t entirely convinced from the demonstration images but after seeing the comparisons of no ALU vs ALU, this is a feature that definitely has a lot of potential to beef up Windows 7.

Related posts:

1. New touch screen technology for Windows 7
2. 9 Ways How Windows 7 Will Save Battery Life
3. Microsoft to release Windows 7 Lite Version for Netbooks