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A compact convenient hand-held, accelerometer-based com puter control device is utilized to control on-screen animated characters presented by a computer-driven display in which the movement, persona, or style of the character is con trolled through movement of the device in a predetermined pattern which results in recognizable patterns of accelera tions that are detected to give the on-screen character a particular persona or style determined by the user. Thus, the system requires only a series of easily learned hand move ment patterns for corresponding character control. In an alternative embodiment, once a movement has been determined, the style or emotional content of the movement is specified directly from gross accelerometer output without pattern matching. In another embodiment, the outputs of two or more accelerometers are combined, with the combined waveforms constituting a language for …