the next computer mouse : your skin ?!

mobile phones would be the size of matchbooks. They'd have full-size

[ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذه الصورة]keyboards. They'd browse the Web. They'd play videos. And, most
importantly, you'd never have to touch them. Sound like too much
to ask? Maybe not. Harrison, a graduate student at [ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذا الرابط] and a former
intern at Microsoft Research, has developed a working prototype of a
system called Skinput that does just that, essentially by turning a
person's hand and forearm into a keyboard and screen. "People
don't love the iPhone keyboard. They use them. But they don't love
them," Harrison said in a interview at the recent Computer-Human
Interaction conference. "If you could make the iPhone keyboard as big as
an arm -- that would be huge." Using Skinput, a person could tap
their thumb and middle finger together to answer a call; touch their
forearm to go to the next track on a music player; or flick the center
of their palm to select a menu item. All of these
sign-language-like movements, which are customizable, would control a
gadget in a person's pocket through a Bluetooth connection. When
fitted with a pico-projector, the Skinput system could display an image
of a digital keyboard on a person's forearm. So, using Skinput, someone
could send text messages by tapping his or her arm in certain places --
without pulling the phone out of a pocket or purse. "You could
pretty much do a lot of what you do on your iPhone," said Harrison, who
says Skinput "is [like having] your iPhone on your palm." The
system, which has been under development for eight months, won't be
commercially available for two to seven years, said Dan Morris, a [ندعوك للتسجيل في المنتدى أو التعريف بنفسك لمعاينة هذا الرابط] researcher who is working with
Harrison on Skinput. Before that can happen, Skinput's sensors
need to get more accurate, he said. In a 13-person trial in Seattle,
Washington, Skinput was found to be 96 percent accurate. But that test
only used five buttons. The system would have to improve for people to
make use of a full keyboard, which would be the "holy grail," Morris
said. "The accuracy is good, but it's not quite consumer-level
yet," he said. Skinput is one of a number of prototypes, ideas
and near-products aiming to make computing more natural. These
devices seek to move beyond the mouse and physical keyboard, letting
people communicate with their gadgets by gesturing, using sign language
or, in the case of Skinput, tapping on their hands, fingers and
forearms. The arm as an instrument Understanding
how Skinput works makes it seem all the more futuristic. The
system turns a person's arm and hand into a wiggling, pulsating
instrument, full of vibrations that can be picked up and translated.
Skinput users wear an armband -- the prototype version is made of an
elbow brace -- that's lined with 10 sensors. These sensors look like
tiny diving boards with dumbbells on one end, and they pick up inaudible
sounds that range in frequency from 25 to 78 hertz. When a
Skinput user taps a thumb and middle finger together, the impact sends
ripples down the skin and through the bones in the person's arm. "They
sort of start resonating -- like guitar strings," Harrison said. The
diving-board receivers read the sound waves to figure out what gesture
the person made, and then relay that information to a phone. Skinput
can tell whether a person tapped a middle finger or an index finger,
because the two moves sound slightly different to the springy receivers.
The system takes one or two minutes to learn the sounds of a
particular person's arm, Morris said, and then it can be used however
the user likes. Trial and error When they started
working on Skinput, Morris and Harrison weren't sure if it would be
possible to turn the human arm into a virtual keypad. The pair tried
clipping sensors to the ends of peoples' fingers and other strange
configurations that made users feel like cyborgs. "We spent a lot
of nights in the lab tapping on our arms and wondering if this would
ever happen," Harrison said. But the most profound achievement of
Skinput is proving that the human body can be used as a sensor, he
said. Morris believes Skinput will make computing accessible to
people in a way that never would have been possible before. With
Skinput, "literally, computing is always available," he said. A
person might walk toward their home, Harrison said, tap their palm to
unlock the door and then tap some virtual buttons on their arms to turn
on the TV and start flipping through channels.
"It's
almost like magic," he said.