If you’re an Apple geek like myself, you might remember back in 1999 when WiFi was a brand new technology, and [Phil Schiller](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_W._Schiller) demonstrated the new iBook’s Airport feature by jumping off a balcony holding an iBook with an attached accelerometer, which sent the accelerometer data wirelessly to Steve’s demo machine for display (see below).

Well, when I found out someone figured out [how to access the raw accelerometer data](http://blog.medallia.com/2007/08/fun_with_the_iphone_accelerome.html) from the iPhone I decided it would be cool to do something with it, and I used Phil’s demo as inspiration.

The demo consists of two simple applications. One application runs on the iPhone collecting accelerometer data and sending it over the wireless network to the other application running on a computer to display the data:

The three lines correspond to the three axes of the iPhone’s accelerometer plotted over time (if you’re looking at the iPhone from straight ahead then x is red, y is green, z is blue). Source code for the applications will be up eventually, but it’s really pretty straightforward.

Of course this is just a simple little demo, but I’ve got some plans for other cool things…

As an added bonus, I found the video of Phil’s demo: