【独科技】新技术令皮肤成为智能手表触摸屏

新技术令皮肤成为智能手表触摸屏...

New tech turns your skin into a touchscreen for yoursmartwatch

One of the biggest challenges with smartwatches is trying to navigate through apps on a relatively tiny screen. While smartphones andtablets have gotten bigger over the years, the gadgets we wear on our wrists need to stay small to avoid looking terribly unfashionable. Today a team at the Future Interfaces Group, a research lab within Carnegie Mellon University,released a look at a novel solution to this problem: making the skin on yourarm and hand act like a touchscreen for your smartwatch.

The system uses a signal-emitting ring worn on the fingerto communicate with a sensing band attached to the watch. When the fingerwearing the ring touches the skin, a high-frequency electrical signal spreadsacross your arm. It uses the distance between the ring and four pairs ofelectrodes in the watchband to triangulate the position of your finger in 2Dspace. "The great thing about SkinTrack is that it’s not obtrusive; watches and rings are items that people already wear every day," said YangZhang, a first-year Ph.D. student at CMU who worked on the technology.

The system can sense continuous tracking, allowing you todoodle a picture for example. It can also sense discrete gestures like swipesor taps. The prototype built by the group as a proof of concept showed off alot of interesting interactions. You can swipe up and down on your wrist tomove between apps, then left or right to enter and exit a program. That is neat, but it basically just replicates what's available already through yoursmartwatch screen.

The really cool stuff happens when you start using your skin as a canvas. You can drag apps off the watch and place them on parts ofyour arm, creating shortcuts back to the app. Put your Twitter app on yourelbow, for example, and you can quickly access it with a tap on that spot from the finger wearing the ring. Adding all that new real estate as part of your touchscreen also opens up possibilities for the watch as a gaming device, for example a long pull on the slingshot in Angry Birds.

The watch can also recognize hot key commands. Trace an"N" on your hand to open up your news app, for example, or an"S" to silence a phone call. Skin and screen can also be used toindicate different modes, with a screen swipe performing a slow scroll throughan address book, and a skin swipe activating a rapid scroll.

There are still some kinks to work out. According to thelab, "keeping the ring powered up is a challenge. Signals also tend tochange as the device is worn for long periods, thanks to factors such as sweatand hydration and the fact the body is in constant motion." They do stress, however, that despite the way it sounds, " The technology is safe.No evidence suggests that the radio frequency signals used by SkinTrack haveany health effects. The body is commonly excited by daily appliances —everything from the tiny amounts of current drawn from the finger bytouchscreens to the electromagnetic noise emanating from fluorescent lights —with no ill effects."

Fornow there are no concrete plans to commercialize this technology, but given theheavy emphasis many tech giants have placed on the smartwatch category, this technology seems like a promising avenue for improving the usability ofwearable devices without compromising style or battery life. Google even showedoff a similar idea last year, a touch-sensitive fabric that would allow gesture control through clothes. Equally interesting are all the subtle new forms of etiquettethat might develop if this tech was commonplace. Was I scratching my hand orreplying to a text message? Dinner dates will never be the same.

译文： 新技术令皮肤成为智能手表触摸屏

随着手机和平板的越来越大的趋势，我们戴在手腕上的智能手表要保持足够的小这样才可以避免看起来不协调。近日来自卡内基·梅隆大学 Future Interfaces Group实验室的研究人员宣布成功研发了一种新的技术，用户可以随时随地将自己的皮肤变为智能手表的触摸显示屏。

用户需要在另外一只手的手指上戴上能发射信号的戒指，同时将传感手环连接到智能手表。当手指接触到皮肤的时候，一个高频电子信号会扫描整个手臂。此时传感器会计算其与带戒指手指之间的距离。Yang Zhang,团队中的一个博士，说：“最大的好处就是这个技术不会是令人难以接受的。因为手表以及戒指都是人们日常习惯佩戴的。”这个系统还可以感应到连续的手势，比如你可以随便在手臂上比划一下然后智能手表可以记录下划过的轨迹。用户还可以用手指上下滑动去选择app，或者左右滑动去退出app。这些都是在智能手表的屏幕上已经实现了的。这个手表也支持热键功能。比如划个N在手上，可以打开新的app，S可以把电话调静音。

不过这新科技还有一段路要研究以达到更好的用户操作体验。研究人员表明如何保持戒指的电量是一个挑战。长时间携带的时候因为汗水灰尘的影响，信号如何保持在一个稳定的范围内也是需要继续改进的。他们强调这项技术是安全的，没有证据表示发出的无线电频率会影响到健康。

到现在为止这项技术还没有商业化的打算，但是考虑到现在各大科技公司都大力投入可穿戴设备，这项技术被认为是十分具有赚钱效应的。谷歌去年其实就已经展示了相似的概念产品，触摸敏感织物的衣服来控制手势操作。相信不远的未来这项技术可以得到市场的认可。

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