新技术把手掌变成手机触摸屏

Sean Gustafson unlocks his iPhone by swishing* a finger across its screen and inputting a four-digit PIN* on its keypad. However, there is no phone in his hand. Instead, he's pressing invisible "buttons" on his palm. And, it works.

Imagine you cannot find or use your phone when it starts ringing. Perhaps it's fallen into the depths of your sofa, or your hands are wet or greasy*.

To decline* the call and send it to your messaging service, you press the area of your palm corresponding to* the position of the button if you had the phone in your hand. Or you could press the buttons to answer the call and turn on the speakerphone.

The idea is certainly strange, but Gustafson and his colleagues Patrick Baudisch and Christian Holz at the Hasso Plattner Institute at Potsdam University in Germany think there is a gap in the market for phones and TV remotes* like this.

For it to work they reason you'd need two things: people who know well where the apps* are on their phone, and a technology that can sense where they are pressing on their hand so a computer can respond* and send commands to your phone.

The Potsdam trio recruited* 12 volunteers from among the iPhone users they found in their cafeteria and tested how well they knew the position of their favored apps without their phone. "We found 68 percent of iPhone users can locate the majority of their home screen apps on their hand," said Baudisch.

Having established a reasonable chance of finding an app's position on someone's palm, they decided to use "depth cameras" – similar to those at the heart of Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing gaming system – to detect where someone is pressing on their palm.

When a users' finger presses on their palm, the camera registers* where and when it does so. The signal is sent to a computer which processes it and then sends the command to your phone.

In their tests, the depth camera was a head-mounted device. "But finally, we expect the camera becoming so small that it fits into clothing, such as the button of a shirt. So people would not even notice if someone carries an imaginary phone," Baudisch said.

"Users will at the beginning use imaginary phones as a shortcut to operate the physical phones in their pockets. As users get more experienced, it might even become possible to leave the device at home and spend the day ‘all-imaginary.'"

Answering calls on the phone would still require the physical device – but it would be possible to access apps and forward calls to voicemail with the imaginary version.

It's not all about phones, however: Gustafson is now working out how a TV remote control could be replaced by an imaginary zapper*.

swish挥动

PIN密码

greasy油腻的

decline拒绝

corresponding to 对应的

remote 遥控器

app 应用程序

respond 响应

recruit 征集

register记录

zapper遥控器