DailyDirt: Beyond Simple Mice And Touchscreens

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The keyboard and mouse combination has been a standard for several decades now, but there's always room for some improvement. Touchscreens are a nice way to interact with phones and tablets (and phablets), and maybe someday we won't be able to keep our greasy fingers off our 5K desktop and laptop screens either. We're always looking out for interesting input devices, and here are just a few other input methods that might get popular.

• If you're using a small touchscreen, it doesn't always make sense to cover up parts of it with your finger. Apple will offer its "digital crown" as an alternative to the touchscreen, but there's also a gesture recognition app for devices that have a camera and some decent processing power. [url]
• Everything gets smaller and smaller, so what's smaller than a smart watch? A smart ring. An integrated accelerometer and some touch sensors could make a wearable ring a more convenient gesture input device. Battery life might be a bit of a challenge for such a small device, but then again the first "smart rings" don't actually look that small. [url]
• More advanced touchscreens may be able to tell the difference between a finger, a knuckle, a fingernail or a stylus. But will these futuristic devices be able to understand the frustration behind a closed fist banging on them? [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: digital crown, gesture recognition, input devices, sensors, smart ring, smart watch, stylus, touchscreens, ui, wearables