Wearable Tech Goes Skin Deep: These Clever Temporary Tattoos Enable You To Control Devices
Wearable tech’s been taken to a whole new level [Photo: DuoSkin]
Good news for those who can’t be bothered to reach into a bag or pocket, you can touch yourself instead! To control your tech devices, that is… say whaaaat?!
Researchers at MIT have found a way of turning your temporary skin bedazzling into a remote control for your phones, tablets and such. DuoSkin is the combination of oh-so-trendy gold leaf tattoos, layers of silicon and insulation and tiny electronic elements, theoretically printable at home and applied as a water transfer (as with all good fake tats), that can act as a device for input, output or communication. The designs can be made up on any basic computer program, furthering their customisability.
‘Input’ uses capacitive touch sensing, meaning your design can control a device through buttons, sliders or act as a 2D trackpad of sorts for skipping tracks in a music player or some such task where you need to appear like a wizard. Although using your forearm to navigate the internet might just make you look like some weird forearm-tickling fetishist.
Input tattoo [Photo: DuoSkin]
The ‘output’ aspect is basically a mood ring for your skin or a Global Hypercolour t-shirt, only without the obvious ‘can you tell I’m hella sweaty’ patches. Thermochromics change colour when the body goes above a certain heat, either changing the colour of the whole tattoo or just selected parts They even created an app called ‘Couple Harmony’ that, by some sorcery, your partner could press a “mood button” on their forearm to make your tattoo change colour to let you know when they’re angry! As if the frustrated prodding of their own arm wasn’t signal enough… Another application is as jewellery, embedded with LEDs to really make that bling pop.
Colour changing output tattoo [Photo: DuoSkin]
‘Communication’ turns your shiny skin tag into a Near Field Communication device (or NFC, the same tech used in contactless pay etc.). Again, not entirely sure how you’re supposed to imbue the tattoo with any kind of information that connects it to to your device (probably witchcraft) using just a home computer but it’s early days yet.
Communication tattoo [Photo: DuoSkin]
“In the future when you walk into a tattoo parlour, you’ll walk out with a tattoo like this” claims PHD student and co-author of the DuoSkin paper, Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao. Whilst that may not quite be the case, it’s certainly a cool idea. William Gibson will be kicking himself for missing that one.
With wearable tech growing at an exponential rate, it makes you wonder how long before we consign recent technological must-haves such as the Fitbit, ‘hoverboards’ or VR phone attachments to the dustbin of history to languish with Bluetooth wireless headsets, Betamax and Minidiscs, long may they rest. Meanwhile, I’m still here with my iPhone 4.
See for yourself here!
