Researchers at MIT have developed a technology that would allow us to control devices with the help of a temporary tattoo.
This new technology will be presented at a symposium held next month and is called DuoSkin and looks like a golden tattoo. The researchers say the tattoo can take the shape of any software graphic and is printed with an electrically conductive golden material.
What is new is the fact that the tattoo can be used as a touchpad or to download data.
We believe that in the future, on-skin electronics will no longer be black-boxed and mystified; instead, they will converge towards the user-friendliness, extensibility, and aesthetics of body decorations, forming a DuoSkin integrated to the extent that it has seemingly disappeared.
The process involves simple materials: vinyl film, thin tattoo paper, glue, and gold leaf. They are overlapped and cut based on a template that can be made by any design software.
Surface-mount electronics are then punched through a small hole in the tattoo paper. This attaches them to the gold leaf which does its magic as the conductive material.
The whole process can be mass produced by machine, or created by users manually. Users would apply this onto skin, just like a temporary tattoo—by sticking it face-down on your skin and dampening it with water.
So far, the team has used the gold leaf interface tattoo for three main functions. First, they used it as an input device, specifically as a controller for a music player. They created interface design templates such as buttons, cursors, and 2D trackpad.
Then they created a "screen" that changes color and lights up depending on emotion or temperature, using thermochromic pigments.
They also tested the interface as a wireless communication device using Near Field Communication (NFC) tags. This means that data can be sent by the tattoo to mobile phones.
Oh, and they've also tried incorporating LED lights into tattoos.
Watch the video below for the full details.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Owo-HaNKbw
