Skinput: the future in your skin.

Have you ever imagined glowing figures on your skin? maybe... a tattoo? Nnno, dynamic glowing figures. Mmmmaybe a moving tattoo? Well, no, we're here to talk about technology, so take a seat, and see how tomorrow you could be playing tetris on your own skin.

The name is Skinput. It uses the body as an input surface, so your own skin can be used as a keyboard, as the buttons of your gamepad, as a tactile screen... you are the display.
The concept is by Chris Harrison, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. He worked on the project in conjunction with Desney Tan and Dan Morris at Microsoft Research.

Skinput uses the body as an echo chamber, detecting sound trends, so when the user taps a particular part of their body, a sensor worn around the upper arm can tell if the tap-point was at a particular spot on the forearm or on one of the individual fingertips, by assessing the vibrations sent throughout the body by the tap.
The real significance of this invention has to do with the improvement for security tactic teams. With this tool, they can have more control of their equipments on the field.

This device is 95% accurate about dots detection, and most important, works even when the user is in movement.
"Skinput" is schedule to be presented at the 28th Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems at Atlanta, Georgia, from April 10 - 15, 2010.

Maybe this is not new for you, or maybe you feel amazed right now. How do you think we could take advantage of this technology? What can you see in our future with things like this? I'm sure you've got something to say, so leave a comment and let's talk about it ;).