Chen Wang

What does the future interface look like in your imagination? The human body is an attractive input device. As the largest organ in the human body, skin is a kind of permanently portable and natural interactive interface. It perfectly supports the proprioception for individuals, allowing us to interact with our bodies without the restriction of eyes. Nowadays, there is barely any input system that can achieve such accuracy over such a large reaction area without visual limitation, in terms of input.

Based on the exploration of skin features and the improvements of sensing technology, I  designed an innovative on-skin input and output system –SKiNFINITY. SKiNFINITY uses human skin as the virtual interactive medium. It consists of two main functions – gesture input and visual output. Through the exploitation of skin features, I have also designed a set of innovative on-skin input gestures. We can accomplish various operational commands by making various interactive gestures (e.g. slide, press, pull, twist) on our arms, thus realising different interactive functions. In the meanwhile, the virtual interface, projected to the back of the hand, is the visual output that receives feedback and information.

This system can be used as a new-type of wearable device, which will solve problems. The screen and interactive area of intelligent devices now are too small, and the input function of them is single. In this way, SKiNFINITY will provide a new thinking model for the intelligent application market. The innovation of an on-skin interactive system, combining the on-skin input model and on-skin virtual interface, gives the skin unlimited possibilities. The future is an era belonging to the on-skin interface.