When Steve Jobs/Apple decided to use the LIS302DL accelerometer in the iPhone, iPod Touch and the 4th generation iPod Nano, he was making a digital statement, that the iPhone is here, as a platform for making game controls much sleeker.

iPhone responds to motion using a built-in accelerometer. When you rotate iPhone from portrait to landscape, the accelerometer detects the movement and changes the display accordingly. So you immediately see the entire width of a web page, view a photo in its proper aspect ratio, or control a game using only your movements.

Source: Apple

Uses of the accelerometer: When you use the accelerometer, you change the orientation of the device, not the screen itself.

1.    Tilting left or right
2.    Swishing Swiping action
3.    Changing between portrait and landscape modes
4.    Shaking the iPhone

Now that you can tilt the iPhone to any which side you want and also make use of its accelerometer as  a speeding device, let’s take a quick look at how some third party application developers have made innovative use of it to create some digital bubbleheads per excellence.

Let’s see some applications under each of these features:

1.    Tilting: For simple tilting: There are a number of games that make use of the tilting function. In fact there are so many games and apps that use the tilting feature of the accelerometer that it’s sort of impossible to list them all. We just list some of them here and see how they work.

Aqua Forest: This puzzle game comes with an incredibly good physics engine and uses simple accelerometer functions for. You need to tilt/slide the iPhone gently to create the sloshing objects and move along the lilting, fuzzy world of Aqua Forest.

Super Monkey Ball: As the tutorial of the game  would tell you, your success in this entire game, through all its magical and weird worlds depends on how good are you in gently tilting the iPhone/iPod touch.

Real Soccer 2009: This engaging game makes full use of the accelerometer. Tilting the iPhone to make the likes of Tevez to make that incisive run and defense scorching pass is very addictive. What with a gamut of 198 teams to choose from.
Zippo Lighter: Apparently this application is simple. The only usage of accelerometer in it is in using the iPhone to swerve the ever burning flame. However, imagine what happens when an iPhone/iPod touch clad audience of about a few thousands start swerving their Zippo applications in unison? This one has become one of our picks because its collective usage.

2.    Swishing/Swiping the iPhone:

iBowl: When you apply the acceleration, you can swish the digital bowl to hit the targets. The way to do it is tilt the iPhone/iPod touch in the actual manner by which you would do the bowling in the actual bowling alley. Although some people will tell you that (and it is), the best way to crash your iPhone, the game is certainly a great example of using the accelerometer as it almost perfectly simulates the real action. Although it does not make really good use of tilting, which would have given the game a nice spin. What if you could spin the ball? As any bowler would tell you, applying a slight amount of spin to the ball at the moment of release helps you immensely in “Striking”.

iBaseball: This one is even better considering you are allowed two different kinds of swishing movements –one with throwing the ball, the other with swinging the bat. In both cases, the developers, SGN, have simulated the real time action, like they have done for the iBowl game.

3.    Changing between portrait and landscape modes: This is best for photo viewing or web searching. For instance, you rotate your iPhone/iPod touch in order to see the same frame, screen for different viewing experiences. Seeing the same snapshot in portrait and landscape mode does give different viewing options. This is particularly useful when you use something like web browsing. Well, the accelerometer does help in aestheticism after all!

4.    Scrambling: Scrabble. You have this very good game of Scrabble which makes innovative use of the accelerometer. You need to shake the iPhone/iPod touch to shuffle the titles.

5.    Other innovative usage: In the action arcade classics like Kroll, you need to use the iPhone accelerometer to jump. iFish uses the accelerometer to do the casting and hooking and Jump Rope –the application where you use the iPhone as a rope (yeah, you heard it right) in order to keep track of your jumps. The accelerometer is used here to give you that extra bit of Why, you have the iPhone’s accelerometer.  And if you install the Jump Rope app in your, you can jump with your iPhone and at the time of each jump, you can flick the iPhone with the flick of  your wrist so that the accelerometer becomes the rope handle.

So what does this mean to have an accelerometer? While so far this has helped in doing conventional things in an unconventional way, its potential is much higher. The most innovative usuage of the accelerometer has so far been in using it as a simulation tool for simulating real life actions. Specially the jerky ones with the hands movement.