3D touch thimble : Wearable device that could make computer mouse obsolete

Two computer researchers Nguyen and Banic from the University of Wyoming in the US have created an intelligent thimble that can sense its position accurately in three-dimensions and respond to a set of preprogrammed gestures that allow the user to interact with objects in a virtual three-dimensional world.

Embedded with an accelerometer, gyroscope and a magnetometer, the 3DTouch device gets attached to the tip of the finger lets the user control the on-screen mouse pointer, just by moving the finger around. It performs 3D selection, translation, and rotation on the screen.

The device is connected by a wire to an Arduino controller which combines the data from all the sensors and is then streamed to a conventional laptop. "This wired connection later could be replaced by a wireless solution using a pair of XBee modules," researchers said.

Nguyen and Banic have also built in a number of mouse-like gestures that allow a user to interact with 3-D objects, by selecting and dragging them, like, finger tap, a double tap and a press gesture and having more than one 3DTouch on different fingers allows multitouch interaction. Their evaluation also demonstrates the device's tracking accuracy of 1.10 mm and 2.33 degrees for subtle touch interaction in 3D space.

The team has published the research that went into the device online at arXiv. "Overall, these guys have an interesting device on their hands that could be coming to fruition at precisely the right time,” says MIT Technology Review.

Still in its nascent stage, the design needs a fresh touch and may well undergo a lot of changes before the technology reaches the masses.

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