Electronics

Skinput turns your hand into a touchscreen and your fingers into a keypad

View 8 Images
Skinput gives you computer functionality literally at your fingertips
Skinput gives you computer functionality literally at your fingertips
Skinput gives you computer functionality literally at your fingertips
The specially-created arm band array
The specially-created arm band array
Skinput gives you computer functionality literally at your fingertips
Skinput gives you computer functionality literally at your fingertips
Skinput gives you computer functionality literally at your fingertips
View gallery - 8 images

Always thought your skin was more than just a thing to stop your insides falling out? Well, you were right. Chris Harrison has developed Skinput, a way in which your skin can become a touch screen device or your fingers buttons on a MP3 controller. Harrison says that as electronics get smaller and smaller they have become more adaptable to being worn on our bodies, but the monitor and keypad/keyboard still have to be big enough for us to operate the equipment. This can defeat the purpose of small devices but with the clever acoustics and impact sensing software, Harrison and his team can give your skin the same functionality as a keypad. Add a pico projector attached to an arm band, and your wrist becomes a touch screen.

In the past, Harrison says he has used tables and walls as touch screens but has experimented using the surface area of our bodies because technology is now small enough to be carried around with us and we can’t always find an appropriate surface.

A third year PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Harrison says we have roughly two square meters of external surface area, and most of it is easily accessible by our hands (eg: arms, upper legs, torso).

He has used the myriad sounds our body makes when tapped by a finger on different areas of say, an arm or hand or other fingers, and married these sounds to a computer function.

A beauty of this type of functionality is our ability to “operate” our body without the need to use our eyes i.e. we can snap our fingers, touch the tip of our nose or pull our ear without having to look. It’s called proprioception.

Harrison says this ability is great operating equipment while on the move, say, changing tracks on an MP3 while out jogging, answering a phone call or starting a stop watch. Not to mention that the possibility of using your hand as calculator means you really can count on your fingers.

The team has created its own bio-acoustic sensing array that is worn on the arm meaning that no electronics are attached to the skin. Harrison explains that when a finger taps the body, bone densities, soft tissues, joint proximity, etc, affect the sound this motion makes. The software he has created recognizes these different acoustic patterns and interprets them as function commands.

He says he has achieved accuracies as high as 95.5 percent and enough buttons to control many devices, his video even shows someone playing Tetris using only their fingertips as a controller.

Harrison's research paper, co-authored by Desney Tan and Dan Morris from Microsoft Research, titled Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface will appear in Proceedings of the 28th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia) in April.

Via Popular Science

View gallery - 8 images
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
10 comments
YukonJack
ruh row,, wait\'ll Sarah hears about this!
Facebook User
Isn\'t this similar to the \"Sixth Sense\" technology demoed by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT at the TED 2009 event?
Dionysios Vasilakis
the next step screening and typing by thinking?
Facebook User
Thought the same thing Mohammad...still VERY cool.
Leonard Dorcean
no WAY!
Facebook User
what next
froginapot
The scrolling function is great!!!!
Michael Seffren
I don\'t know about you guys but i wouldn\'t want to be running around tapping my self everywhere, and also you have to carry that arm band thing around, and its no different then a cell phone its just a different way to touch it.
Facebook User
There are some amazing capabilities that come to mind with the technology that is now being developed. The opportunities are limited only by the imagination to expore possible applications of the technology. These articles excite the mind willing to think beyond current ideas of what is possible.
Facebook User
Does anyone know if this technology would work by tapping you fingers on something else? i.e. Instead of tapping the fingers on your left hand with the fingers on your right hand could you tap the fingers of your left hand on a wall(solid object) and pick up the signal from that? I seems more intuitive to me to pick of the signal from the hand that does the tapping rather than the part of the body being tapped.