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Regardless of how quickly technology is advancing, the physical key seems to remain a part of our everyday lives. Many of us have multiple keys for accessing different parts of our homes, and while we no longer need to insert a key to open a car or office door, we still carry some form of fob or card for wireless locking/unlocking.
At the 2011 Taipei International Invention Show, a so-called invisible key has been shown off and managed to win Gold in the Invention Awards during the four-day event. How do you make a key invisible but still capable of securing a lock, you may ask. By replacing the key with a hand gesture.
What the inventor Tsai Yao-pin did was to take a hint from motion controllers like the Nintendo Wiiuses, but create a system that can track the 3D movement of a hand rather than something held in the hand. His team of researchers, working out of the Technology and Science Institute of Northern Taiwan, developed a chip capable of performing such tracking.
The user can setup a complex hand gesture only they know. Then, when they want to lock or unlock a door they place their hand in front of a sensor and carry out the gesture. Obviously some kind of gesture recording procedure is required first, but once done you can no longer forget or lose your key, you can only forget the gesture.
The Gold Award has gone a long way towards confirming the invisible key is both clever and usable. Tsai Yao-pin believes it will be available commercially by the middle of 2012 as he already has interest from several companies.
via Physorg
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