The Body Surface Screen

Skinput:

The body Surface Screen

11/11/2012

Kevin Houts

Have you ever thought it would be cool to use your phone through your skin or change songs by just pressing your arm? Well in today's world there is some type of technology that is making those ideas very possible. This technology idea I am talking about is called Skinput: Appropriating the Body as an Input Surface. I am sure most of the people that would read this paper have no clue what a skinput is. But to give you just a small look into what skinput is, well it is a technological device that allows your screens from a phone, iPod, computer or any type of electronic and the screen will show up on your arm, palm or even the desk. Now that you are intrigued into skinput, it's time to tell you all about, the key factors as this soon to be amazing product came to be from the beginning.

To start out for this project, there are three main men that were in charge of the idea and how it was. Chris Harrison is the first and main guy is the forward movement of this product; he is a Ph.D. candidate in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. The other two men involved strongly in this are Desney Tan is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and Dan Morris is a researcher in the CUE group at Microsoft Research. After those three men introduced the idea Microsoft, the company Dan and Desney work for put money up to help move it forward. Even through Microsoft has not commented on the future of the project, other than it is under active development and reportedly nowhere near commercial devices for the next 2 year from now. To help along with Microsoft in the effort to introduce this new product Carnegie Mellon University, the college where Harrison graduated.

The story of the future of technology in Skinput all starts with an intern by the name of Mr. Harrison, while he was doing an internship at Microsoft in the summer of 2009. He started to think about the technology devices we have these days and how "If you look at our devices, we want them to be small, so that they're portable, but we also want them to be large, so that they're useable."(Goode, 2010) Which this lead him to "began to explore the ideas of using other surfaces - ranging from tabletops to the skin on his arm - as a keypad for various electronics, ranging from smartphones to video game devices."(Goode,2010) With the fact that people these ages want a smart phone that is smaller and more of a mobile device but yet, not losing the ability to have enough surface area that we are able to still have a usable human interface. This is what got Harrison really thinking if we don't have the ability to scale up nor able to scale it down, what do we do to make everyone happy? This first that he found when researching, that there are outputs to help the device out in such as speakers and digital projectors, just little of what he found out, but he stated "Returning to our earlier example of laptops and smartphones- we could instantly reduce their size by half or more, and in many use contexts, end up with more screen real estate."(Harrison,2010) But as there may be part for the outputs, we do not have any good analog for input larger than a device.

The armband prototype is the final prototype Chris and his fellow workers made. What the prototype look is a black armband that is meant to wrap around you bicep, just one arm it goes on. The next parts of the prototype are "two arrays of five sensing elements"(Harrison, Tan, 2010, p,4) that are connecting on to the inside of the arm, touching your skin so the sensors can read the vibration and feel of your fingers and arm. With this Chris and his group hopes that enough information from the bicep area. It is not just the bicep they are looking to get information from with this device, hoping to receive information also from the "Humerus the main bone that runs from shoulder to elbow" (Harrison, 2010, p,4), along with