SKINPUT TECHNOLOGY

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SKINPUT: APPROPRIATING THE
BODY AS AN INPUT SURFACE
By
ALEENA ANNA ANDREWS
S7-IT
Roll No:5

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•Smaller screens are more common, touch
screen is everywhere.
•Provides only limited interaction area.
•Cannot simply make buttons and screens
larger.
•Microsoft puts forward a new flesh-control
input technology called “SKINPUT”.
INTRODUCTION

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 Human body for acoustic transmission.
 Surface of the skin - input device.
 A wearable armband that is non-invasive
and easily removable.
 Makes computing more natural.
 Uses the concept of proprioception
WHAT IS SKINPUT?

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 Large interaction space
 User simply taps his skin in order to control
audio devices, play games and make phone
calls .
 Developed by Chris Harrison, Densely Tan,
and Dan Morris of the Microsoft Research's
Group.
 First public appearance at Microsoft's Tech
Fest 2010

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Touch Screen vs. Skinput Technology

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•Listens to vibrations in the body.
•Also responds to the various hand gestures.
•Arm band detects the acoustic signals and
converts them to electronic signals.
•Browsing through a mobile phone menu,
making calls, controlling portable music players,
etc..
PRINCIPLE OF SKINPUT

8. Technology Used
 Skinput, the system is a combination of two
technologies:
1. Pico projector applies the use of projector in a
hand held device.
2. An acoustic detector detects the ultra low
frequency.
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 Very small projector, basically used in gadgets.
Also known as pocket projector or mobile
projector.
 Provides a direct manipulation, graphical user
interface on the body.
 The system comprises three main parts:
 The Laser light source
 The Combiner optics
 The Scanning mirror
PICO PROJECTOR

12. •Study of sound waves inside living body.
•When a finger taps the skin, several distinct
forms of acoustic energy are produced.
•Whole concept of skinput is based on the
following waves:
1. Transverse Waves
2. Longitudinal Waves
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BIO ACOUSTICS

13.  Created by the displacement of the skin
(ripples).
 Sensors are activated by the waves moving
underneath it.
 Moves outward from the point of contact.
 Tapping on soft part of the arm creates higher
amplitude than tapping on bony areas.
Transverse waves
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15. Longitudinal waves
 Some energy is transmitted inwards, towards
the skeleton; excites the bone.
 This excitation vibrates soft tissues
surrounding the entire length of the bone,
resulting in new longitudinal waves that
propagate outward to the skin.
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17. •An array of highly tuned vibration sensors are
used.
•Employed with small, cantilevered piezo films.
•Cantilever is adjusted by adding weight in the
resonating frequency.
•Irresponsive to forces parallel to the skin.
•Sensor design-inexpensive
SENSING
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18. •Has two arrays of five sensing elements
•Each sensor array is sensible to particular set of
frequencies:
1. Upper – fleshy bicep.
2. Lower – denser parts of arm.
ARMBAND PROTOTYPE
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20. •A keypad, menu, or other graphics are beamed
onto a user's palm and forearm from a Pico
projector .
•An acoustic detector then determines part of
the display that is activated by the touch.
•The software matches sound frequencies to
specific skin locations, allowing the system to
determine which “skin button” the user pressed.
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HOW SKINPUT WORKS?

21. •Mackie Onyx 1200F audio interface to
digitally capture data from the ten sensors.
•Connected via Bluetooth to a conventional
desktop computer , where a thin client written
in C interfaced with the device using the Audio
Stream I/O protocol.
•Each channel is sampled at 5.5 kHz.
•Data is then sent from thin client over a local
socket to the primary application, written in
Java.
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22. Three key functions of this program :
1. Live visualization of the data
2. Segmentation of inputs from the data stream
3. Classification of input instances.
•The audio stream is segmented into individual taps
using an exponential average of all ten channels.
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24. Computing
device
Armband
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25. APPLICATIONS
 Mobile
 Gaming
 I-pods
 An aid to paralyzed
persons.
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27. ADVANTAGES
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 No need to interact with the gadget directly.
 Don’t have to worry about keypad.
 People with larger fingers get trouble in navigating
tiny buttons and keypads on mobile phones.
 The body is portable and always available, and
fingers are a natural input device.

28. DISADVANTAGES
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•Difficulty in wearing a very big band around their
arm for the day.
•Not sure about the possible skin diseases or types of
cancer, one can get from using this product.
•Initial cost is very high which will not be affordable
for the common man.

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•The most important achievement of Skinput is that the
human body can be used as an input interface.
•A person taps his palm to unlock the door and then tap
some virtual buttons on his arms to turn on the TV and start
flipping through channels.
•Extensive Research is going on currently on Skinput to
make the armband more smaller.
Incorporate More Devices with this system.
Extend accuracy level.
SKINPUT IN FUTURE

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•Skinput allows the human body as an input
surface.
•It describes an armband used to detect and
localize finger taps on the forearm and hand.
•This system performs well even when the
body is in motion.
CONCLUSION

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 Advanced Graphics Technology , Kasik , David J.Computer
Graphics and Applications, IEEE Volume: 31 , Issue: 3
DOI: 10.1109/MCG.2011.35 ,Publication Year: 2011
 http://www.chrisharrison.net/projects/skinput
 Ahmad, F., and Musilek, P. A Keystroke and Pointer Control
Input Interface for Wearable Computers. In Proc. IEEE
PERCOM ’06, 2-11.
 Amento, B., Hill, W., and Terveen , L. The Sound of One Hand:
A Wrist-mounted Bio-acoustic Fingertip Gesture Interface. In
CHI ‘02 Ext. Abstracts, 724-725.
 Argyros, A.A., and Lourakis, M.I.A. Vision-based Interpretation
of Hand Gestures for Remote Control of a Computer Mouse. In
Proc. ECCV 2006 Workshop on Computer Vision in HCI, LNCS
3979, 40-51.
REFERENCES

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34. QUESTIONS???
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