Skinput, or how to wear a working computer display on your skin

This is pretty cool. Skinput, which is a sensor system, allows you to use yourself as a phone, a computer display, and even play games. Skinput is hooked up to a utility belt that can operate like a phone a calculator, or play music.

Skinput is a gadget and software control system. It’s an attempt to reduce gizmo accessories and multiple gadgets. People now carry around so many bits of hardware that it’s getting ridiculous, so researchers Chris Harrison, a PhD student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon and colleagues Desney Tan and Dan Morris from Microsoft Research, have come up with something pretty different. If nothing else, as a visual spectacle, Skinput is well worth a look. The BBC has a video showing Skinput in action. (Just look out for the commercial at the start.) For those who remember writing on their hands, this is a sort of vindication. The principle is based on acoustic signals through density of tissues. Your tap on the arm translates through sensors into an instruction on a menu. The graphic display appears on your arm or hand, wherever the display is set up to be located, and from then on it’s like using a cell phone. (Actually, it’s better, because the graphic display on your arm is about 200 times bigger.) You can use Skinput to control devices you carry, like a dashboard setup. So in theory you can control your phone, your iPOD, etc, with one tap on your arm. It really does look impressive. Apparently it’s up to 95% reliable, but with more than about 10 locations it becomes less so. That level of reliability, however, is obviously better than some standard consumer hardware. There’s an interesting glitz factor, too. Skinput has marketability written all over it. This could be the visual status symbol of the near future, and the indispensable personal equipment of the distant future. Skinput isn’t necessarily just a consumer thing, from the look of the prototype. It could be an invaluable communications tool, useful for calling for help when in trouble or even a medical monitor, if the principle applies to sensors of that kind. Developing something like this for commercial markets may take a while, but the functionality and look is a definite positive market factor. The cosmetic possibilities are interesting, too, and likely to be very marketable. You could even have, excuse the expression, your own body skins, like the computer displays. You could be gold one minute, green the next. This could turn tattoos into a computer science, and racism into a hopeless task. I can see an entire culture being created based on body display. What you look like can now be a form of software. That can only be good.