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Future Interfaces Group Featured in Wired

In the Media

Skin buttons.

Smartwatches are growing in popularity, but they’re just small enough to make navigating the interface annoying. Wired recently featured work by Assistant Professor Chris Harrison and his Future Interfaces Group on a device that projects interactive buttons onto skin as a way to make the smartwatch’s display larger.

“To build the ‘Skin Buttons,’ the team embedded a watch with four laser diodes,” the article says. “These laser diodes are covered with a static piece of film that projects fixed icons onto the skin. Using infrared proximity sensors, the watch is able to tell when the user touches an icon; that information is communicated to the watch and the device reacts as though you touched the screen directly.”

Check out the whole article here.