Knuckles and nails get invite to the touchscreen party

FOR all the swiping, flicking, pinching and zooming, our interactions with touchscreens are still pretty limited. That could be about to change.

To open up the screens to commands from other parts of the hand, Chris Harrison, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, has built a prototype smartphone that can distinguish between touches from the knuckle, fingertip and even fingernail. He has just launched a company called Qeexo to sell his device.

A modified Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone, fitted with a small vibration sensor and running Harrison's FingerSense software, listens for the acoustic and vibrational differences between the three different types of touch. A fingertip could select an object while a knuckle tap could work like the right-click on a computer mouse and open up a submenu, for example.

"A big problem with touchscreens right now is that they are very simplistic, relative to the capability of our hands," Harrison says. "We could do so much more."

"The more ways you have of expressing input into smartphones the better," says Joseph Paradiso at the MIT Media Lab in Boston, who has worked on similar technology.

Harrison says the sensor is a standard piece of electronics that can be added to the main circuit board of any smartphone, and he is already in talks with major phone manufacturers to do just that. "The real magic is in the software, this artificial intelligence that lives in the heart of the phone," he says.

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