In Disappearing Mobile Devices, Tao Ni and Patrick Baudisch sought to determine what qualities “ultra-small” devices would have. These devices would be so small that normal input and output that existing mobile devices have would be obsolete. They would most likely have to be mounted onto the body in some way, such as on the earlobe or on the tip of a finger. Since the device is that small, an LCD or LED screen would be indistinguishable from a single pixel, making it useless for the human eye, and could amount to just one possible “button” or touch panel. These devices will eventually transcend human restrictions for device size (i.e. finger size and eye capabilities) and also physical device restrictions for size (i.e. camera size, light requirements). Without a screen or a useful button system, the only available form of input would be through a touch panel or motion sensor. In this paper, the researchers sought to determine if input into a device with just a single motion sensor would be intuitive and still useful as a mobile device for consumers. The main research and user studies were concerned with gesture recognition over the motion sensor using gesture languages that already exist: EdgeWrite, and Graffiti (a version of the language developed by Palm for their PDA series). They used both a small LED sensor attached to the arm of a test subject, and a wireless optical mouse turned upside down that had been modified for gesture recognition. After having test subjects try to input letters using these gesture languages into the device, they found that these devices could be used for text input with reasonable accuracy. They commented on the potential applications, including commands for a portable music player (navigation), controls for an AC system (i.e. the letter ‘u’ for up in temperature), and easy text entry for text messaging or emails.
Discussion
I thought this sounded super interesting! It would be really awesome to be able to text a friend using gestures across the arm, and get back a message to a receiver that would play onto my ear bone or close to my ear, and read the message to me. But, the model seems to break down there. There are so many applications that small mobile devices like the iPhone do that a small device without a screen could not. And so while it may be fun for a while to type using gestures, control your music library, and send text messages to friends (or even answer calls!), it would not be functional for viewing pictures, watching videos online, formatting documents, or reading the daily news. Plus, it will take industry a while to catch up to these researcher’s ideas and actually shrink devices small enough to fit on just one pixel of a screen!
I agree with you that this sounded completely interesting, but it's so much easier to see something on a screen (not to mention more private) than to hear something close to your ear, as cool as that would be! With these devices getting smaller and smaller it's hard to tell if these things will function the way that they are intended. I'm not entirely sure what they are trying to do with these devices besides seeing if they will pick up gestures while being a very small device. It seems that they need to work on the fact that people's hands are different sizes since the device seems to work better with their whole hand and not just their finger.
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