"Skinput" Turns Your Body Into Your I/O

kkleiner writes "Skinput is a system from Carnegie Mellon's Chris Harrison that monitors acoustic signals on your arm to translate gestures and taps into input commands. Just by touching different points on your arm, hand, or fingers you can tell your portable device to change volume, answer a call, or turn itself off. Even better, Harrison can couple Skinput with a pico projector so that you can see a graphic interface on your arm and use the acoustic signals to control it. The project is set to be presented at this year's SIGCHI conference in April, but you can check it out now in several video demonstrations."

Old News

[camperdave]

This is old news. I've been able to lower the volume of devices by sticking my fingers in my ears for ages now.

p33nput

[Anonymous Coward]

So what happens when you, um, touch yourself? Is that the web accelerator to open porn?

Signals coming in too fast.

[Thyamine]

Buffer overrun. You have submitted too many commands at one time. Please try again.

"Honey, what are you doing in there?"

"Uh, nothing. Just trying something out."

sounds awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

so I bump my arm, crank up my mp3 player full blast and hang up on my boss all at once

do you think you can make an attachment to kick me in the balls too?

Re:Rainbow's End

[cayenne8]

Brings to mind a new slant on a old saying...

"Tap it once and your trying to refresh the screen....tap it more than three times and your playing with it..."

New technology using tapping?

[Skarecrow77]

Nobody can use any sort of touch interface but the iphone! Patent infringement lawsuit from Apple lawyers inbound in 3...2...1...

Re:Old News

[padrepio]

Yes but with Skinput, I would use my wife's keyboard and dual display more often.

Re:I don't know about that...

[Hognoxious]

My touchscreen phone frequently dials ex-girlfriends unintentionally when I leave it on the contacts page and put it in my pocket without turning the display off first.

And that concludes the case for the defence, m'lud.

Re:Old News

[AliasMarlowe]

Yes but with Skinput, I would use my wife's keyboard and dual display more often.

And in return, she might use your joystick...

Re:I don't know about that...

[Anonymous Coward]

something in your pocket wants to get in touch with your ex-girlfriends...

Re:I don't know about that...

[jimbolauski]

You too mine only happens at 2am outside a bar I think its some sort of software bug.

Re:Signals coming in too fast.

[svtdragon]

I think they probably ought to exclude the "fap" acoustic signal. Otherwise it might spawn too many child processes.

Re:I don't know about that...

[mcgrew]

You think that's bad, once I had oneof those candy bar cell phones in my pocket, and the damned thing dialed 911 when I was buying a bag of reefer. Talk about embarrasing...

I won't use anything but a flip phone since then.