Smart Phone Keypad on your Hand, Arm or Leg?

Well, we seem to be blending in with our personal technology more than ever before, now we watch as our smart phone technology experts are taking it all to a whole new level, rather than having a virtual keyboard, or slide-out key pad on our smart phones, they are building systems which display it on your body. How does this work? A group at MIT has a mini-projector unit and it uses acoustic sensors to see where you type on your arm, hand, leg, or other body part.

There is another group out of London which has a similar technology they call Skinput, which uses a technique that registers when you tap on your skin in a certain place. This technology was recently in the Science News and it made a big splash in “New Scientist” magazine. The system also works with new gesture software, meaning you can probably expect all this to be incorporated in a future version of:

Motorola Droid
Google’s Nexus One
HTC Clone Smart Phones
Apple 3GS iPhone
Palm Pre Plus
Backberry Bold

So, far we have Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Baylor College and a few Universities in Europe collaborating on all this new technology – indeed, Microsoft is also in on it all, as part of their computer-human interface and AI research. What does it all mean? It means that within a couple of years, maybe sooner, at the fast pace this technology is coming to market, that we will see phones with such features on the shelves of all the smart phone retailers and cellular phone service providers.