Microsoft SwordFight Lets You Virtually Clang Your Blades. Smartphones Required.

Sword-fighting is no piece of cake. And learning it is no cream either. To avoid all the complications with the physical injuries, one team at Microsoft Research has come up with a hardware localization technology that lets you have a go at the multi-player sword-fighting using just your smartphones.

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You don't need any peripheral accessories to play this game. Rather, you need some advanced technology that'll enable mobile devices to localize. Thomas Moscibroda, a Lead Researcher in the Mobile & Sensing Systems Research Group, Microsoft Research Asia, along with his other colleagues have formulated a tech called the FAR. It's a new sound-ranging arrangement that enables a smartphone to track other smartphone from its sound. One phone transmits a high-pitched sound, and the other establishes the distance and position of the first phone by calculating the time it takes for the sound to reach its speaker.

In SwordFight, the two players hold their phones as if they're swords, and try to jab each other with it. If one player jabs within 15 centimeters of the second phone, then the first player gains a point. The phone's accelerometer and compass give out who did the striking and who got struck. Here's a video -



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