Fingers to stick out of your MoBile phone
PARIS: A French researcher has invented a robot finger that attaches to your mobile phone. It can wriggle across your desk. It can stroke your hand.
“My PhD subject is around touch in communications,” explains Marc Teyssier, a researcher at Telecom Paristech engineering school. “When we talk with people in real life we touch each other to communicate emotions, for example a stroke on the arm, or stuff like that. But for mobile devices and interaction in general in computers, we don’t use touch at all. So my starting point was: how can we bring touch in humancomputer interfaces?” He designed, built and patented the MobiLimb robotic finger, which plugs into a mobile phone and looks very much like a real finger. It can drag the phone across the table. Your friends can activate it and operate it remotely, to give you a comforting pat on the wrist when they talk to you. But when people saw it, everyone had the same reaction. The creepy phone finger tells us something about who we are, and what we expect from a world where your phone listens and responds to your commands like a person, but still doesn’t have a moving body, Teyssier said. For now, the robot finger is both too human, and not quite human enough. “Technology looks like human, but its not exactly human, so our brain—we don’t know how to react.”