Wearables have some things to figure out before they can reach mainstream adoption. From making the most of minimal screen estate, to distinguishing themselves from our phones in terms of what they bring to the table, many people simply aren’t sold on the idea that they need yet another display before their eyes or on their wrist. Perhaps in adding a new screen to the tally, we won’t just need to reinvent the apps that power the device, but reimagine how we interact with the device in the first place.
Future Interfaces Group, a Carnegie Melon research lab, just released a look into a novel solution regarding the problem with tiny screen navigation: transforming your skin into an extended touch screen for your smartwatch, a technology it calls ‘SkinTrack.’ By wearing a signal-emitting ring which communicates to a sensing band attached to your watch, every touch, tap and swipe at the wrist translates into a corresponding action with the respective app in use. By measuring the distance between the ring (which is worn on the interacting finger) and your watch, alongside four pairs of electrodes within the watch band, the technology is capable of triangulating the position of your finger in 2D space.
“The great thing about SkinTrack is that it’s not obtrusive; watches and rings are items that people already wear every day,” says Yang Zhang, a first-year Ph.D. student at CMU who worked on the technology.
The system can sense continuous tracking, meaning you can doodle a picture or swipe between apps with ease. And while all of that can be done without the extra equipment, with your skin as canvas you can begin to do some exciting things: chiefly dragging apps off the watch and onto parts of your arm, creating custom shortcuts back to the apps. It also augments gaming apps such as Angry Birds, by enabling you to drag a slingshot past the physical threshold of the watch itself.
Equally as exciting is the fact that the technology recognized hot key commands; swipe an ‘N’ to enter your news app, or an ‘S’ to silence a phone call. It even indicates different interactions with your smartwatch. Scrolling on your watch will tell it to slowly sift through an address book for instance, while scrolling off-watch will do so more rapidly.
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Of course, as with any technology there are still some kinks to be worked out. As an unnamed lab worker suggests, “keeping the ring powered up is a challenge. Signals also tend to change as the device is worn for long periods, thanks to factors such as sweat and hydration and the fact the body is in constant motion.” Still, the lab assures that “The technology is safe. No evidence suggests that the radio frequency signals used by SkinTrack have any health effects. The body is commonly excited by daily appliances—everything from the tiny amounts of current drawn from the finger by touchscreens to the electromagnetic noise emanating from fluorescent lights—with no ill effects.”
Currently there aren’t any plans set in motion to commercialize the product, but the heavy weight placed on the smartwatch category by giants like Apple, Samsung, Pebble and Google suggests that the technology can make a welcome addition to built-in features for future-gen devices. Always eager to enhance the usability of their product line, SkinTrack is a relatively easy way to expand the realm of possibilities within devices seemingly too small for use.
This article was written by Ido Lechner from PSFK and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.