Carnegie Mellon University researchers in collaboration with the company Microsoft has succeeded in creating an exciting technology called Skinput that turns human skin into a touch surface.
Perhaps many of you have seen the laser QWERTY keyboard which projects a laser beam to form a virtual keyboard that can be used for text input. Well, Skinputs system is very different from the one used in such laser projectors.
Skinput system registers the ultralow-frequency sound generated by human skin, muscles and skeleton right after youve tapped your finger at any body part, thus determining the area that you just touched. When watching the embedded video, which show how human skin reacts to the finger taps, you can see in slow motion how sound waves travel on the human skin.
These sound waves are registered by a special armband which contains piezoelectric cantilevers – sensors that record pressure, acceleration and force. There is also a pico projector built-in this armband which projects the touch interface.
Although this is still only a prototype, you can probably imagine how such technology could be used in computer games or various control devices. The system was tested by 20 volunteers, and most of them agreed that Skinput is easy to use.
