On my fingertips

Roberto Saracco October 24, 2017 Blog 271 Views

Using your thumb and index finger as an input device. Credit: Dartmouth University

There are so many ways to transform analogue into digital and yet new ones keep popping up.

Look at what researchers at Dartmouth University have presented at UIST 2017: an ingenious way to detect the movement of your thumb on your index fingertip using an infrared sensor (watch the clip).

Rubbing one’s thumb on one’s index fingertip is a usual gesture. Why not using it as an input device to provide some basic data to a computer? This is the question addressed by the team of researchers that have leveraged on the amazing sensitivity of infrared sensors, able to detect a minuscole difference in temperature between two areas. As shown in the clip the system is able to detect shapes drawn by the thumb on the index, basic shapes like a circle and a rectangle, a check or a question mark…

Is it useful? I wouldn’t say so. However, the possibility to have a device learning how to interpret minute gestures coupled with other capabilities, like detecting emotion by looking at faces is slowly transforming our living space, making it more and more aware and this eventually will change our relation with the ambient.