Many smartphone users want to escape from the cramped QWERTY keyboard that comes with their handset and use a virtual QWERTY that can be displayed like a hologram on the table in front of them. This virtual keyboard can be the same size as the QWERTY used on desktop computers which gives the user more space to type. This will result in faster and more accurate text input by smartphone users.
Spraying on a smart skin can allow you to use a virtual keyboard instead of your phone’s QWERTY
Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford and senior author of the study, said, “As the finger bends and twists, the nanowires in the mesh are squeezed together and stretched, changing the electrical conductivity of the mesh. These changes can be measured and analyzed to tell us exactly how the hand or fingers or joints that move”.
Smart skin is washed with soap and water
Kyun Kyu “Richard” Kim, a post-doctoral scholar in Bao’s lab and first author on the study said, “We bring an aspect of human learning that rapidly adapts to tasks with just a few trials known as ‘meta-learning.’ allows the tool to quickly recognize new arbitrary hand tasks and users with a few quick experiments. Kim added, “Furthermore, it is a simple approach to this complex challenge that means we can achieve faster computational processing times with less data because our nanomesh captures the details subtle in its coverage,”
The smart skin contains a mesh made up of millions of nanowires coated with gold and silver
Future uses of this technology include smartphones, apps, and games. Surgeons will be able to spray smart skin on their hands and control robotic surgeons in operating rooms hundreds of miles away. The skin can also be used to touch an item and find out everything about that particular item. The Daily Beast Liken this feature to “wearable Google Lens” which is a good analogy.
Imagine using a spray-on smart skin to type on a virtual keyboard or recognize things by touch
Let’s see how virtual QWERTY will work. Using machine learning, an algorithm can learn the movements needed to type the letter “X” on the keyboard based on electrical conductivity patterns. Once the algorithm is “trained” to recognize the algorithm for all letters, numbers, punctuation marks, etc., a physical keyboard is no longer needed. And this will open up the ability to type on a virtual keyboard that can be easier and more accurate to type than your phone’s QWERTY.
