Yes, we’ve all gone about interfaces for ages, now, and how they’re there to humanise the phone, to make it intuitive, and, in a metaphysical sense, make it into part of you. However, according to New Scientist, a new tech’s being worked on that takes “being part of you” out of the realms of the metaphysical and into the realms of “oh god, it’s alive, you finally did it, argh!”
Well, alright, maybe not, but you have to admit that was one way to get your attention…
Y’see, a joint taskforce (yes, I know that word implies they were some kind of government team of supersoldiers, but I just like the sound of it) of boffins from Carnegie Mellow University and Microsoft’s Redmond lab have come up with a brand new way of controlling the touchscreen on your phone. And step one of doing so is removing the touchscreen altogether. You don’t need it, you see, since the interface, using a system called Skinput, is on your arm. I concede that I may have misled you slightly with the oh god it’s alive nonsense before, but no, there’s nothing icky, it’s not grafted in or anything.
Nope, instead, it uses something I wouldn’t have thought of in terms of touchscreens: acoustics. You can try it out for yourself. Tap your arm at different locations, and you’ll notice (well, you might, depending on how good your ears are) that each spot makes a slightly different sound. By using an armband with tiny, piezoelectric, acoustic sensors (each tuned to a different frequency), the tech can pinpoint where on your arm you tapped. And since that armband also knows what bit of the interface it’s projecting onto that bit of your arm (using pico-projectors… woohoo, FINALLY a use for pico-projectors), it can tell where on the ’screen’ you tapped.
Which is rather clever, really, and it even manages to be more exciting than the screen on the HTC HD2 since, y’know, it’s only big. It’s not made of skin, light and soundwaves.
News Source :- http://www.mobileshop.com/