This Piece Of Synthetic Skin Can Help You Feel The Strikes In Video Games

A piece of synthetic skin can help to increase the realistic feel of video games or better, give prosthetic limbs the sense of touches. It will be on a patch with no battery required and can stick to any part on our body.

When it needs to create the sense of touch, the synthetic skin will vibrate and push the surface of the real skin. The patch can be wirelessly powered, thanks to a copper coil and an internal magnet. To make it looks less visible, the outer cloth can be colored to match the wearer’s skin tone.

The experts behind this piece of synthetic skin are John Rogers and some of his colleagues at the Illinois-based Northwestern University. In a demonstrating session, the patch was stuck on the arm of a man with one prosthetic hand. When he gripped a cup, the synthetic skin will work according to what the sensors send to it, letting the man feel the cup in the artificial hand.

The sense of touch is of great importance for anyone when they use a limb. For example, when the weather is cold and you need to turn a doorknob, you will know exactly how vital touch is when it comes to manipulating and grasping objects.

This artificial skin can also benefit gaming. One of the possible applications is that it can vibrate to help users feel the strike in the virtual world of video games. This can make games become more realistic.

The next step for the experts now is to improve the efficiency of the patch to sense objects, like slightly cooling or heating the skin.