There’s a flood of new smartwatches and other wearable devices coming just around the corner, and every one of them will require a connection to your smartphone. Wireless NFC technology has already made things a little easier when it comes to pairing, but researchers at Disney want to make things even easier by just having you shake a couple of devices in unison.
The system relies heavily on wireless RFID technology, and pairing a couple of objects or devices equipped with RFID tags simply requires the user to hold them together and shake them in a unique but random pattern. The actual movements themselves aren’t important, just that they’re perfectly in sync between the two objects.
At the moment the research is focused on pairing a couple of toys together using an RFID receiver that’s able to detect their movements in 3D space. But eventually the approach could make its way to standalone devices, so pairing your smartphone and smartwatch could simply require you to wave them around in the air a couple of times — eliminating annoying passcodes or digging into each device’s settings. [Disney Research]