Forget about Google’s fancy radar, here’s a new kind of interface we want with our phone. OK. Maybe not. What you see here is an artificial skin that, incredibly like real, organic skin, is capable of responding to stroking, pinching, tapping and tickling.
Called Skin-On Interfaces, it is a research project spearheaded by Bristol Interaction Group involving researchers from Telecom ParisTech, HCI Sorbonne Université and CNRS.
“Human skin is the best interface for emotional interaction. We propose this new paradigm in which interactive devices have their own artificial skin, thus enabling new forms of input gestures for end-users.”
To demonstrate what Skin-On Interfaces can do, the researchers have created a mobile phone case wrapped in this eerily lifelike skin and proceed to show how it could serve as a back-of-device interface.
In a way, it is peek into the future of robots where the humanoids could actually have skin to “feel” when touched and also “feel” “sensation” when they touch something.
Skin-On Interfaces is not the first artificial skin, but it sure is the creepiest and also the one that could see practical uses in consumer-grade robots to, you know, make them for human.
Images: Marc Teyssier.
Source: boing boing.