Researchers use palm to work as iPhone touchscreen

Researchers in Germany are working on ways that would allow phone users to perform normal telephonic functions without needing to hold the phon - they could just tap their palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an "imaginary phone" system that would relay the request to their phone.

The technique would make use of a depth-sensitive camera to pick up the tapping and sliding interactions on a palm,  software to analyse the video, and a wireless radio to send the instructions back to the iPhone. According to Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, the imaginary phone prototype works as a shortcut to free users from the necessity to retrieve the actual physical device.

Baudisch and his team envision someone who has to take a call on his smartphone while washing dishes. Their imaginary phone would allow users to simply slide a finger across their palms to answer it remotely, relieving them from going through the process of drying their hands and fumbling to answer.

The imaginary phone project, developed by Baudisch and his team, including Hasso Plattner Institute students Sean Gustafson and Christian Holz, resembles the gesture-based interface called SixthSense developed by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT, but it differs in a couple of significant ways.

For one there are no new gestures that users need to learn, the invisible phone concept simply transfers the iPhone screen onto a hand. Also, there is no feedback, unlike SixthSense, which uses a projector to provide an interface on any surface.

Baudisch and Gustafson last year developed an interface with which a wearable camera captures gestures that a person makes in the air and translates them to drawings on a screen.