According to an Intel blog post on Friday, July 27, Windows 8 Ultrabooks and convertible tablets will soon boast new sensors, which will give users more options to interact with their devices.

The five new sensors include a compass, accelerometer, GPS, gyroscope, and ambient light sensor, all of which are required for a convertible tablet to be eligible as an Ultrabook. Also, all five of the sensors are recommended for regular laptops to be branded as Ultrabooks.

The compass sensor, which is optional for Ultrabooks, is very useful for showing users which direction they are facing, allowing them to automatically get details about landmarks and such. The GPS, which is recommended for Ultrabooks, pinpoints the user's location so the device can deliver mapping, directions and other relevant information. The accelerometer, also recommended for Ultrabooks, is often used to protect the hard drive in case the laptop is dropped or moved, as the sensors designed to detect motion and gravity. In addition, the accelerometer can also provide users with information such as travel time based on movement.

The gyroscope is optional for Ultrabooks. Similar to accelerometer, the gyroscope detects rotation, as well as the rate of rotation. It may not sound like much, but many games actually make use of this sensor for better motion control. Lastly, the ambient light sensor, or ALS for short, is used to automatically detect lighting conditions to the laptop can adjust screen brightness based on the surrounding atmosphere. This allows for higher battery efficiency, and it is recommended for Ultrabooks.

Many of these sensors have already been integrated into laptops. The Samsung Series 9, for instance, includes an ambient light sensor, while accelerometers are popular for a while now for their usefulness in saving hard drives from crashing on the ground. It is intriguing nonetheless that Intel is adding more tablet- and smartphone-like sensors to Ultrabooks, and it's even more interesting that convertible tablets will sport all of these sensors. The impact is even greater considering that once these sensors become ubiquitous, increasingly more applications will employ such technologies.

When it comes to smart detection for instance, smartphones and tablets are currently more capable than laptops. With this new generation of Ultrabooks, however, the gap may be filled soon enough. At the end of the day, it's really up to Ultrabook manufacturers to decide which sensors they want to embed in their gadgets. According to Intel's instructions, you can see which sensors are included in your current laptop by looking under the "sensors" section in the Windows Device Manager.