A ‘smart’ tattoo’ to control your smartphone?
Very Minority Report-ish for the Wearables category but then again so was chiral scrolling before Apple brought it mainstream with the iPhone. Always a question of whether Disruptive Technologies such as this make it from the lab to the real world and then to commercialization, but this looks pretty cool.
A group of PhD students from the MIT Media Lab and researchers from Microsoft Research have come up with the ultimate wearable: a temporary tattoo that can turn into a touchpad, remotely control your smartphone, or share data using NFC. The technology. Researchers say you can design a circuit using any graphic software, stamp out the tattoo in gold leaf (which is conductive to electricity), and then apply other commodity materials and components that would make the tattoo interactive.
The paper presents three key use cases for the tattoo: you could use it to turn your skin into a trackpad, design it to change color based on temperature, or pull data from the tattoo. In one photo shared by MIT the tattoo even includes LED lights, creating a kind of glowing display on the skin.
Source: MIT and Microsoft Research made a ‘smart’ tattoo that remotely controls your phone – The Verge
