Today I saw a very cool talk by researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft, about an armband that senses vibrations caused by touch. If you wear the armband on your left arm, and then use a finger of your right hand to touch various places on your left arm (or hand or fingers), a computer can analyze vibrations in the armband to figure exactly where you touched.<\/p>\n
This means that you can turn your own body into a user interface. For example, you can dial a phone number just by tapping various places on your palm — as though your hand were a numeric keypad. Things get really interesting if you project images onto your arm and hand (eg: through one of those tiny pico-projectors). Then your body effectively becomes a complete computer interface.<\/p>\n
The authors gave all kinds of amazing demos, and the audience was impressed by the sheer novelty of it. But things got even more interesting during the question and answer session after the talk. People were clearly engaged by the philosophical implications of turning our own bodies into computer interfaces.<\/p>\n
One guy got up to the microphone and asked “How does it feel to be a button?” The speakers didn’t really have an answer to that. I suppose by the time technology has truly turned you into a button, you won’t really notice you’re a button.<\/p>\n
In the break afterward, I was chatting with some friends who had also seen the talk. We started musing about how such technologies might change interpersonal relations. For example, body-touch technologies might change the taboos around how and when it is appropriate for one person to touch another.<\/p>\n
Imagine if I could use your body as a computer interface, or vice versa. Not only could this be considered an intimate act, but such actions could very well have real consequences. If I let you touch me, and you end up deleting my files, that could be considered a violation of trust.<\/p>\n
We may very well be entering a world in which “pushing someone’s buttons” is more than a euphemism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I saw a very cool talk by researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft, about an armband that senses vibrations caused by touch. If you wear the armband on your left arm, and then use a finger of your right hand to touch various places on your left arm (or hand or fingers), … Continue reading “Being a button”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3530"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3532,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3530\/revisions\/3532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}