If you have ever considered getting and tattoo, and couldn’t really decide what piece of art would stay with you the rest of your life, you also might have considered getting a temporary tattoo. Now, you can choose to wear one that will not only be aesthetic, but also functional. DuoSkin presents a fabrication process that turns metallic temporary tattoos into connected interfaces. MIT Media Lab in partnership with Microsoft Research use gold leaf, a material that is cheap and accessible, to produce customized functional devices that can act as input for smartphones or computers, display output based changes in body temperature, transmit data to other devices via NFC, and in addition to all this resemble jewellery and look great on your skin.
When it comes to wearable technologies that incorporate computer and mostly mobile technologies, we got used to companies produce smart watches or rings. Production of these devices requires expensive materials such as conductive carbon or silver ink, but DuoSkin, that is directly attached to your skin and thus provides much broader canvas for its use, is made from an ingredient that is commonly known to be applied to frames of paintings, put into chocolates and even drank with alcoholic beverages – gold leaf.
Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, PhD student at MIT, explains that metallic jewellery-like temporary tattoos are growing trend in Taiwan where they became a part of cosmetics and street fashion that is affordable enough to “change and edit your appearance whenever you want.” Using temporary tattoo printing paper and gold leaf Kao and her colleagues were able to produce three classes of devices – sensing touch input, displaying output and wireless communication devices. Their fairly inexpensive and easy-to-set system can turn your skin into a trackpad, or virtual control knob for adjusting volume on your connected device, change colour based on your body temperature, and contain data which can be read by other devices via NFC wireless communication. They can also contain embedded LED lights for on-skin illumination effect. The DuoSkin fabrication process can become a great affordable tool, which can be customized to everyone’s own liking.
Credits: