Motion as a Transformational Technology
June 14, 2012, Invensense Motion Interface Developers’ Conference, San Francisco—Steve Nasiri from Invensense talked about the new era for motion sensing and the resulting market opportunities arising from the technologies.
Motion interfaces are a transformational technology. Comparing technologies, Bluetooth chips about 2.5 billion units per year, WiFi 1.9B, touch 1.4B and motion interfaces are about 2 billion units per year. Relative to units shipped, motion interfaces are bigger than the game changing technologies of WiFi and touch.
One reason for the size of the industry is the rapid adoption of motion interfaces in many consumer products. The advent of combination chips with accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer plus the recent addition of pressure allows many platforms to take advantage of this sensor information.
The key enabling functions of gestures, pointing, tracking, and 1:1 movement matching are being integrated into many different platforms. The common feature in all implementations is the resulting intuitive user interface. These functions have been adopted by all major OEMs across a wide variety of products.
Motion sensors for gaming has achieved nearly 100 percent attach rate across consoles, handheld devices, and controllers. In smart phones, over 60 percent of the high-end phones have motion sensing capabilities, and tablets have a 90 percent attach rate. The key drivers for motion interface in mobile devices are gaming, health and fitness, augmented reality and panoramic viewers, and gesture interfaces.
As long as these markets continue to grow, the motion sensing industry and grow with them. Smart phones are projected to grow 11 percent in the US and 31 percent worldwide in ’13, after the bubble years from ’08 through ’11. In units, this equates to 166 million smart phones in the US, and 815 million worldwide. Tablets are projected to grow 19 percent in ’13 in the US, and over 24 percent worldwide.
Mobile gaming is projected to grow to be a $32 billion business by ’16. $13.6 billion are in app unit sales and $18.3 billion are in in-app purchases. This represents a CAGR for the apps of over 18 percent from ’11 through ’16, and 41 percent for the in-app purchases. Recent research indicates that consumers spend more time on apps than on Web mobile and desktop combined.
The most used apps are social and photo and have the greatest growth compared to music, productivity, social networking, and entertainment. Social networking consumes as much time as gaming, which can also be considered at least a partial social function.
Beyond the mobile devices, motion sensors are moving into many other areas. The largest growth areas are likely to be in sports and fitness recording and monitoring, and healthcare. The sports and fitness sector will move from unique athletes to average and beginning ones, while health monitoring is projected to grow dramatically as the baby boomers look for better and lower cost health maintenance.
Personal navigation will combine GPS and the motion sensors to provide high accuracy for indoor navigation. Increased sensor integration will enable new form factors and applications for sensor-aided navigation. Wearable sensors will provide monitoring and recording capabilities for sports, fitness, and home and remote patient monitoring.
Motion sensing will be combined with other monitors in many health and fitness applications. Devices will range from wristbands, to wearable sensors including gloves and patches, to dedicated application-specific monitors. All of your daily activities can be monitored by various motion sensors to ensure that you’re taking care of yourself and
functioning within normal ranges.
Smart glasses with motion sensing elements will enable more virtual reality and augmented reality applications. Smart clothes, shoes, and accessories may add communications capabilities to the motion sensing as well as energy harvesting to become self powered.
Location-based services are another area where motion sensing contributes and enables greater capabilities. Location aware advertising offers capabilities for price comparisons and access to additional information as well as mobile offers for competing products. Most consumers would switch brands if offered real-time mobile promotions while shopping.
Motion sensing will evolve to become motion tracking. The advent of nine axis sensors in very small packages allows end users, and vendors, to determine what you are doing and where you’ve been. There are opportunities for many more high-volume applications for the various types of motion sensors available.
