Skinput-technology makes it possible to use your skin as an input-surface for all sorts of mobile applications. By measuring and analysing the acoustic waves in your body produced when tapping your skin signals can be sent to a computer, or more interestingly a smartphone or music player device.
Devices like smartphones or mp3-players are compact and have a lot of power. However, they have very small buttons or gawky touch-screens which limits interaction. Earlier, tables or other hard surfaces were already being used as external keypads. A camera registered your finger's movements over the table and interpreted them as instructions.
However, the recent trend of being mobile always and everywhere inspired the people of Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University to develop Skinput, which uses tappings on your skin as an interface.
When tapping your skin with your finger, the touches create acoustic waves. There a two different types of waves: transversal surface waves which run away from the touch point over the skin's surface and longitudinal waves which run from the outside of our body towards our bones and back to the skin's surface. These waves are detected and analysed by a receiver worn around the arm. A different spot on your body creates a different wave. This allows for giving different instructions.
Source: FlandersDC, Techniline
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
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