Nail Display Aims To Reinvent Our Interaction With Our Gadgets

Every once in a while a new technological approach comes along that redefines the course of history. We have seen it many times. Take the touchscreen for example, it reinvented the phone the day it was introduced. It happened again with online music stores. The list of these things could be as long as we have time to write it. There are also small breakthroughs that bring already existing technologies an aided solution. The nail display concept is one of those innovations.

This little nifty thing does exactly what is sounds like. It’s a little device which you put on your finger and connect to your mobile device. Its primary purpose is to simplify the use of your mobile device when you have it in your pocket for example. By touching a metallic surface, the nail display could scroll through your list of music which resides on your mobile device. You change categories by pivoting the nail display over the metallic surface. Once you have selected the song, you can simply start playing it by removing your finger from the surface. This is demonstrated on a music player without a display. It’s a brilliant solution, which if perfected, could mean we’ll soon have an all-in-one solution for both gesture and touch capabilities.

The project and device itself are not surprisingly dubbed NailDisplay, and it was developed by Chao-Huai Su and his colleagues over at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. As a gadget, it is still in its infancy, but once it is perfected, I am quite sure it would work wirelessly with your surrounding devices. Combining this with gestures could mean we would have a tool very much like the one Tom Cruise used in Minority Report. People have attempted that kind of screen interaction device for a long time. This nail display could be the catalyst of such a device.

As with any concept gadget, it might come across a little quirky at first. But by adding a faster processor, making it wireless, and making it connect to a Kinect-like device, the Minority Report device would be brought to reality. Innovations like this could change the way we interact with our computers and devices forever.