Blowable Computer Interface


Remember Christopher Reeve’s blow controlled wheel chair? [Shwetak] sent in his blowable computer interface. It doesn’t require anything but an on-board microphone and a decent set of lungs. It works by taking audio fingerprints to determine the location on the screen that you’re exhaling on. The demo video (avi) shows off some surprisingly accurate location detection. You can get a few more details from his research paper. (If you need a decent avi video player, check out VLC player.)

18 thoughts on “Blowable Computer Interface

  1. Of course his site is slow…. I don’t think he expected the millions of hits he’d be barraged with once this story broke on Google. Chill out and give the guy time to upgrade his site storage.

  2. Incredible. I’m always really interested by different means of input sensing… from the Acoustic interface with the piezoelectric elements to the LED proximity sensors…

    I can see this having a huge application, if coupled with voice recognition, in making computers completely accessible for crippled individuals.

  3. It’d be interesting if this concept could be applied to creating a sort of touch-screen mouse. A pen (or something) would emit a high-pitched noise, too loud to be heard by the human ear, when it is touched to the screen. This would be how a user clicks the mouse button. Any programmers out there, please feel free to steal this idea :P

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