New Technology:The Gaming Touchpad You Can Wear on Your Wrist

A team of Korean scientists has just developed a clear, jelly-like computer touchpad you can wear. Just as you would on a smartphone screen, you can use the soft pad to scroll and click, bang out a tune on a virtual piano, play a game of chess or Angry Birds, or just doodle. Created in a laboratory at Seoul National University by materials scientists led by Chong-Chan Kim, the pad that can even be stretched to 1000 percent its normal area and still be used.

"The versatility comes from the material what we have used," says Jeong-Yun Sun, one of the scientists behind the new invention. The touch pad is made from a fascinating combination of hydrogels, which you can think of as almost a gelatinized plastic. "Hydrogels are soft, transparent, and bio-compatible," Sun says.

The key to this creation is that the hydrogel material in the touchpad contains an electrically conductive material called lithium chloride salts. That means electricity can zip though the inside of the pad as if it were a wide, spongy copper wire. A constant amount of current flows in from the four corners of the pad, creating a uniform electric field. When your finger presses down somewhere on the pad, that current spikes. Computers attached to the pad can calculate where exactly you touched, depending on how much the current changed at each of the four flowing corners. It doesn't matter if the material is being stretched or not—the basic science remains the same.

Sun and his colleagues found that the simple touch-pad could be used to play a range of games, all while the pad was attached to one of the researcher's wrists, whether that's tinkling out the notes of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on the virtual ivories of a 12-key keyboard, losing at chess, or flinging Angry Birds at unsuspecting pigs. The scientists are hopeful that the commercialization of their new tech "will be coming soon," says Sun.

There's just one problem that needs to be solved: While the scientists found the touchpad remained highly sensitive after being stretched and shrunk more than 1,000 times, we know that hydrogels have an annoying propensity to dry out over time. Imagine the frustration of your keyboard or console controller decaying like a piece of old rubber. According to Sun, the fix is for the scientists to find a clever way to encapsulate the pad in a thin film to keep it out of direct contact with the air.

We'll be waiting, our wrists ready to play.