MIT created a temporary tattoo that can control your connected devices
In the future, your tattoos could be as functional as they are expressive. MIT, in partnership with Microsoft, created a new touch interface, DuoSkin, that allows temporary tattoos to interact with smartphones or computers, display output based on body temperature changes and even transmit data using NFC. Another conference. “Great.” This one’s different, trust us.
Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, PhD Learner at the MIT Media Lab, explains the origins of the project in the video above. Kao says that metallic jewelry-like temporary tattoos are a growing trend, providing a grand opportunity for creating something that meshes with existing fashion while also adding genuinely useful functional capabilities. She notes that in Taiwan, there’s a “huge culture” of cosmetics and Str fashion, which is affordable and accessible sufficient that “you can very easily modify and edit your appearance whenever you want.” The DuoSkin team wanted to attain the same thing with their technological twist on the tattoo trend
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As a result, the system is actually designed to be fairly inexpensive and simple to set up for just about anyone. It uses gold leaf, the same thing you’ll occasionally discover delicately flaked atop swanky desserts, for basic conductivity, but otherwise employs everyday crafting materials love a vinyl cutter and temporary tattoo printing paper. You can utilize any desktop graphics creation software you love to design the circuit, then feed that design through the vinyl cutter, layer the gold leaf on top and apply it as you’d a standard temporary tattoo. Small, surface mount electronic components including NFC chips complete the connectivity picture.
Researchers devised three different ways in which the DuoSkin tattoos could be used, including as input devices that can turn your skin into a trackpad, or a capacitive virtual control knob for adjusting vol on your connected device, for example. The tattoos can also display output, changing color based on your body temp love a Hypercolor T-shirt. Finally, they can contain data to be read by other devices, via NFC wireless communication. Kao also shows how they can contain embedded LEDs for on-skin light effects.