Interactive nails give you a screen at your fingertips

Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent

(Image: Kayleigh O'Connor/Solent News/Rex Features)

We already have displays at our fingertips - one day, we might have them ON our fingertips. Engineers in Taiwan are investigating ways to coat fingernails in organic light emitting materials and display useful content instead of the latest garish styles from the nail salon.

The aim is to continue the visual display that's on your smartphone or tablet's screen, even when your fingernails are obscuring it. Chao-Huai Su and colleagues at National Taiwan University in Taipei don't care that the NailDisplay technology they visualise doesn't exist yet - they are trying to work out how we will use it when it does arrive. So they created a clunky, half-centimetre-thick, 2.5-cm diagonal OLED screen and attached it to a large finger ring so they could give the idea a test drive.

(Image: Chao-Huai Su et al/National Taiwan University/Academia Sinica)

In their draft paper to be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris in April, they imagine three use cases: first, the screen on your fingernail enlarges the are of the device's screen beneath it so that it's easier to tap small buttons or read small text. Second, they imagine it providing a display for screenless music playing devices like the iPod shuffle, showing control buttons or even video on your NailDisplay.

Finally, thanks to the incorporation of an accelerometer, the display could show content related to the gestures your fingers are making.

The possibilities are endless - but what would you do with such a device?

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/27fab026/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Conepercent0C20A130C0A10Clight0Eemitting0Efingernail0Edisp0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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