Ingles

advanced technology

skinput
turn your body into a touch screen!
1 one day we might make phone calls, turn on our MP3 players, play games, and, who knows, maybe even open our front doors bysimply tapping our fingers on our skin. at least, that's the hope of researchers Dan Morris and Desney Tan at Microsoft, and Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University, who are developing a technologycalled Skinput (Skin input) that will turn our skin into touch screens.

2 skinput works by detecting the ultra- low frequency sounds that are produced when we tap different parts of our skin. Ittakes advantage of the fact that mechanical vibrations travel differently through locations on our bodies produce different vibrations. The skinput software listens for the vibrations, then turns theminto instructions for devices.

3 to use skinput, you attach an armband that has a small projector in it to your upper arm. The projector beams graphics onto your forearm. An acoustic detector in thearmband then determines which graphic you touched. Using wireless technology like Bluethooth, the information can then be transmitted to devices like cellphones and laptops.
4 Harrison explains thatthe motivation for skinput stems from the increasingly small size of today's mobile devices. He notes that the human body is an appealing input device because it has roughly 21 square feet of externalsurface area - much of it easily accesible to our hands (e.g., arms, upper legs, torso). Furthermore, while we usually have to look at our handheld devices in order to operate them, we can accuratelyinteract with our bodies in an eyes - free manner. We can easily touch our palms or press our two middle fingers together without looking at each part.

5 the potencial applications of sinput areendless. Consider, first, the everyday situations where it would be convenient to control devices simply by touching specific points on your body. You're cooking dinner. Someone calls you and your...