Roll Up Your Sleeve, Watch a Video with This Smart Watch Forearm Projector

We’re all slowly getting used to the idea of wearable technology, fabulous flops like the creepy Google Glass notwithstanding. But the big problem with tiny tech is in finding the real estate for user interfaces. Sure, we can make it tiny, but human fingers aren’t getting any smaller, and eyeballs can only resolve so much fine detail.

So how do we make wearables more usable? According to Carnegie-Mellon researcher [Chris Harrison], one way is to turn the wearer into the display and the input device (PDF link). More specifically, his LumiWatch projects a touch-responsive display onto the forearm of the …read more

Continue reading Roll Up Your Sleeve, Watch a Video with This Smart Watch Forearm Projector

Everything’s a Touch Surface with Electrick

Touch screens are great, but big touchscreens are expensive and irregular touchscreens are not easy to make at all. Electrik is a method developed by several researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that makes almost any solid object into a touch surface using tomography. The catch is that a conductive coating — in the form of conductive sheets, 3D plastic, or paint — is necessary. You can see a demonstration and many unique applications in the video below. They’ve even made a touch-sensitive brain out of Jell-O and a touchable snowman out of Play-Doh.

The concept is simple. Multiple electrodes surround …read more

Continue reading Everything’s a Touch Surface with Electrick

Everything’s a Touch Surface with Electrick

Touch screens are great, but big touchscreens are expensive and irregular touchscreens are not easy to make at all. Electrik is a method developed by several researchers at Carnegie Mellon University that makes almost any solid object into a touch surface using tomography. The catch is that a conductive coating — in the form of conductive sheets, 3D plastic, or paint — is necessary. You can see a demonstration and many unique applications in the video below. They’ve even made a touch-sensitive brain out of Jell-O and a touchable snowman out of Play-Doh.

The concept is simple. Multiple electrodes surround …read more

Continue reading Everything’s a Touch Surface with Electrick

Harpsi-Gourd Gets You Into Thanksgiving Spirit

Halloween might be over, but for some of us there’s still another pumpkin-centric holiday right around the corner to give us an excuse to build projects out of various gourds. During a challenge at a local event, [Michael] came up with a virtual cornucopia of uses for all of the squashes he had on hand and built a touch-sensitive piano with all of them.

The musical instrument was dubbed the Harpsi-Gourd and makes extensive use of the Arduino touch-sensitive libraries. Beyond that, the project was constructed to be able to fit into a standard sized upright piano. While only 15 …read more

Continue reading Harpsi-Gourd Gets You Into Thanksgiving Spirit