Directly from Carnegie Mellon University researchers today we have one SmartWatch very interesting which is capable of turning our forearm into a touchscreen, as you can see in the clip below. Called LumiWatch, this smartwatch has an integrated projector that transposes a surface of 40 cm² in which the watch interface is displayed.
Thanks to some intelligent sensors, any interaction we have with that surface projected on the hand is interpreted as a touch of the screen, and various functions are controlled from here. Everything starts with a gesture swipe to unlock, like on the iPhone, and from there a list of applications is displayed, or various other functions that we can use in the watch.
This Smartwatch Turns Your Hand into a Touchscreen
LumiWatch has an integrated depth sensor and three red, blue and green lasers, and the interface projected on the hand can be easily seen even in daylight. The watch projects a light of 15 lumens, and its software constantly monitors finger movements on the virtual interface, it has a 1.2 GHz processor, 768 MB RAM and a 740 mAh battery.
"Although obstacles remain for practical adoption, we believe our work demonstrates the first functional projection smartwatch system and constitutes a significant advance in the state of the art."
LumiWatch is offered for now only as a prototype, and that's because if it were sold at the moment, it would have a price of 600 dollars, much higher than anyone would pay. Even so, LumiWatch shows us how far ideas like this can go and how useful smart watches that can have projected interfaces can prove to be.
