Scientists in the UK have thought differently about touchpad designs: their system peeks at your fingertips to see what you’re touching. It can sense when you’re pushing on something and how hard, so everything —even a 3D uneven surface— could be made into a touchpad. Quite why they selected to demo this with a purring rock we’re not sure. But we enjoy it.

Apparently the team from Nottingham found it fairly simple to image the blood movements underneath your fingernails as you push on something, so their camera tracks these changes and works out whether you’re touching an object and with what pressure. Try it out yourself: it’s fairly easy to spot the color moving around beneath your nail.

Since the system doesn’t require complex touchpad technology, it’s pretty easy and cheap to produce. Good for tactile museum exhibits thinks the science team; good for whacky game console controllers think I. There’s just one flaw: nail polish can confuse the camera, so naked nails it is. [New Scientist]

Via [Gizmodo]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008 at 2:13 am and is filed under General Tech News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.