Johnny Chung Lee thinks outside the box. Way outside the box. You may remember this enterprising fellow from his experiments hacking Wii hardware in several insanely innovative ways, which landed him his current gig in the Applied Sciences division at Microsoft, where he’s been helping out with the motion-sensing technology of Project Natal.
Now, he doesn’t appear to be directly involved in this particular project, but he posted the video on his Procrastineering blog, and it’s clearly right up his alley. The idea is to use a small band of electrodes around the forearm to track movement of the hand and fingers; simple calibration can allow software to detect fairly specific movements of everything attached to that muscle group.
Naturally, the designers were quick to hook the system up to Guitar Hero, allowing a player to fret notes by simply touching different fingers to his or her thumb. It looks a bit awkward in its current stage, but it’s easy to see how technology like this could be used to control software in new and unusual ways.
I’ve posted the video after the break, but take a look at the original post for a bit more context.
