(credit: screenshot from YouTube video)
if you think Microsoft is letting its guard down after the success of Kinect (success as hack, not as a gaming peripheral), then you are all so wrong. as if moving our body for gaming isn’t enough, Microsoft wants us to touch ourselves to make a call or play a game of Tetris. yup, that’s right – touch ourselves. no keyboard, no mouse, just us and our arms and hands. Microsoft has tasked a team of researchers to dream up of new ways on how we might one day make a call, control our media players and reinstall the Windows OS to Mac OS. nah… i made the last one up.
one of the projects, dubbed “Skinput” is a system that allows you control your devices by touching specific points on your arm. apparently, unique vibration is generated when we ‘hit’ at different parts of our arm, thus this technology is able to pick up this unique signature and matches it to a specific operations, such as shuffling of songs on your MP3 player. check out the video after break on the vibration-sensing based control, which also can combine with a pico projector mounted on the armband (which also houses the sensing and processing unit of Skinput) to project an interface on your arm or palm.
another method being explored is sensing of electric signals from the muscles as it contracts. hence, when we executes different gestures or movements, our muscles in our body will emit signals in which a contraption such as an armband with sensors built-in could pick them up and translating them to the preassigned action. check out the cool video of hacked Guitar Hero taking input from muscles electric signals after the jump.
while these developments will certainly improve our mobility greatly but it will not see the light of implementation until many years on as they are still in its research phase. though the prospect sounds exciting but these technologies would have far bigger implication to our daily life than we thought. we would probably grow conscious about how we interact with the objects around us, as these moves might just trigger you to call 911 or volume up your media player accidentally or perhaps, getting tiny bruises all over our arms.
via Fast Company