Skinput Sysem Uses Human Arm as Gadget Control Panel

With the Skinput system, you can control your devices remotely by touching your own arm.

By Kathryn Hawkins. Posted on March 03 2010

Press photo from ACM.

As tech gadgets keep shrinking smaller and smaller, you probably appreciate the extra room in your travel bag. But there’s one problem with the trend towards microscopic devices: your fingers aren’t shrinking along with them.

It can often be tough to type or use controls on such a miniscule space. But a new system known as Skinput could give you some extra room to move through an innovative solution: beaming a device’s controls directly onto your forearm, and allowing you to use your own skin as a touchpad.

To use the device, you wear a sophisticated armband that includes a miniature “pico” projector and an acoustic detector. The projector is used to beam the images onto your forearm, while the acoustic detector is able to pick up the sounds made by tapping on your arm. Because the detector can track minor differences in tone, it is able to tell which part of your arm is being touched, which corralates to a particular control.

The novel control system was developed by researchers at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft’s research lab. “Skinput works very well for a series of gestures, even when the body is in motion,” they claim. They invited 20 volunteers to put it to the test, giving them the chance to scroll through menus on their own forearms. Despite the difference from an iPod, the volunteers were able to navigate the system with ease.

The researchers plan to present their Skinput system at Atlanta’s ACM Computer-Human Interaction meeting in April, and commercial applications for the system may begin to develop after that. We’ll be curious to see the possibilities: maybe an air guitar that actually plays real music is in the cards?

To see the Skinput system in action, check out this video.

Filed under: Business, General Interest, Science, Weird,

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