Interface

As many of us know from personal experience, accessing a smartphone's touchscreen can be difficult when your hands are full. That's why scientists have developed a hands-free system that lets you control a phone via facial gestures – and those gestures are detected in your ear.

Brooklyn-based instrument maker Landscape is bringing players closer to the action by essentially turning them into human patch cables. Instead of using a cable to patch between different modules on a rack, the AllFlesh jack is plugged in and the performer's touch bridges the gap.

If you've ever sat down to a dish of Jell-O and wished that it was a touch-screen control , Carnegie Mellon University has got your back with a technology called Electrick that turns almost any surface, including the gelatin dessert, into an interactive control using a can of spray paint.

Using your fingers on a smartphone's screen can be hard enough, with the smaller screen of a smartwatch being even more of a challenge. It was with this in mind that scientists created FingerIO, which turns such devices into sonar systems that are capable of tracking the user's finger movements.​

There's no doubt that tablets and smartphones have made multi-track audio recording on the run easier than ever. But connecting instruments to iPads and iPhones has never been quite as simple. The iRig Pro Duo helps make that final connection and allows musicians to truly record on the run.

Having a touchscreen on your PC could certainly be handy at times, and that's where Neonode's AirBar comes in. It's a slim module that magnetically attaches below the screen of an existing PC, instantly providing it with touch functionality.

A team from Politecnico di Torino and MIT led by Giorgio De Pasquale of the Italian University has created Goldfinger – a self-powering glove that acts as an intuitive human-machine control interface.

UK supermarket Tesco says it will update the voice and phrases of its self-service checkouts. This, in itself, is nothing notable, but the reasoning behind it tilts at a broader issue: how we expect computers and robots to address us. Tesco's opinion? We don't want them bossing us around.

While a wrist-worn smartwatch may be easier to access than a smartphone that has to be retrieved from a pocket, the things certainly have tiny screens. That's where iSkin comes in. It allows users to control mobile devices using flexible, stretchable stickers that adhere to their skin.

IK Multimedia has announced the iRig 2, a new guitar interface that includes an output to a powered amplifier, an input gain thumbwheel and is compatible with many modern Android smart devices.

Samsung has announced a new, updated version of its eye-tracking mouse. Known as Eyecan+, the technology uses a combination of hardware and software to allow people with disabilities to browse the web, as well as compose and edit documents.

When it comes to interacting with our devices, the mouse and the touchscreen are the predominant methods. Senic, the team behind a new device called Flow, is aiming to change that by adding quite a few new ways for users to interact with their computers, smartphones, and tablets.