In the Future your Body can be a Touchscreen... Seriously

Tech by Joey Paur

In the future, it looks like we may actually have the option of using our body as a touchscreen, allowing us to make calls, play music and play video games on our skin. Pretty crazy and weird, I know, but it's a reality. In all honesty though, I would much rather play my video games on a high resolution screen, the skin really isn't a nice display to play on, I'm just sayin'. At the same time this thing is still pretty freakin' cool.

A group of researchers from Carngie Mellon University and Microsoft have developed the device called Skinput, which turns your body into a touchscreen by sensing movements in your skin and muscles. This research team is going to present a paper about Skinput next month at the Computer-Human Interaction conference.

Researcher Chris Harrison writes:

Appropriating the human body as an input device is appealing not only because we have roughly two square meters of external surface area, but also because much of it is easily accessible by our hands (e.g., arms, upper legs, torso). Furthermore, proprioception (our sense of how our body is configured in three-dimensional space) allows us to accurately interact with our bodies in an eyes-free manner. For example, we can readily flick each of our fingers, touch the tip of our nose, and clap our hands together without visual assistance. Few external input devices can claim this accurate, eyes-free input characteristic and provide such a large interaction area.

Now watch this Skinput technology in action! This is seriously crazy awesome. It's only the beginning, so who knows how far it will go.

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