iPod to mouse? Watch CMU research demo

Twist it, flick it: Adding optical sensors to miniature mobile devices like iPhones, a CMU doctoral student and professor have created Minput, which allows those gadgets to work like a computer mouse. Ph.D. candidate Chris Harrison and his thesis advisor, CMU professor Scott Hudson, discussed the device earlier this month at CHI 2010, the Association for Computing Machinery’s annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Watch the video here.

Harrison is pioneering ways to move computer interaction away from the standard LCD screen. He’s also developed Skinput, which lets people use their skin as a touchcreen for miniature mobile devices, and also presented his research on that device at CHI 2010.

Harrison, in his third year of post-grad work at CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, says Minput solves the problem of ever-smaller display screens. Touch screen interaction doesn’t work very well and couldn’t do pinching for zooming without obscuring a tiny digital display. The prototype added inexpensive optical sensors to the back of a wristwatch-sized television screen. “Obviously it’s a lot smaller than an iPad. It’s like an iPhone nano, the screen’s only 1.5 inches. It is for a really small device,” he says.

Harrison says simple wrist motions allow Minput to navigate touchscreens for a variety of hierarchical interfaces: zooming in on a high-res photo, flipping through a music library, or scrolling on a web page. Minput also permits precise operations like selecting one sentence of text from a paragraph–difficult to perform where the size of the finger might occupy a majority of the screen.

Harrison believes he’s got a patent pending on Minput. But with “about 20” such applications in his resume since high school days, the 25-year-old researcher says, he ”doesn’t keep track.”

Source: Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University
Writer: Chris O’Toole