Access on Main Street

The Spatial Interaction Touchless Kitchen Tap is a new faucet design where a variety of options–temperature, flow rate, number of streams–can be adjusted via gesture. Reasonably accessible and touch-free; promising, assuming that it can accommodate a range of dexterous abilities.

Ubergizmo: Concept: Spatial Interaction Touchless Kitchen Tap

Holiday Inn will soon be installing special room locks that open when you play a coded song for them from your smartphone.  Both the unlock tones and your room assignment will be sent to your phone automatically, so you can skip the front desk.  The OpenWays system may help customers who have dexterity or visual difficulty using keycards, but it also makes the accessibility of smartphones that much more essential — as these mobile devices become ever more integral, being left out really means being left out.

Soon You’ll Unlock Hotel Room Doors By Playing Songs on Your Phone–Gizmodo

Eyegaze technology has long been a specialized input option for individuals with near-total paralysis, but it’s been expensive, cumbersome, and not always reliable. Now researchers at Dartmouth have come up with a promising mainstream–mainstream!!–eyegaze technology for the Nokia tablet. We’re opticmistic that this can be applied to other devices as well.

Ubergizmo: Eyeballs get tracked thanks to new algorithm

Here’s an interesting addition to the realm of gesture-based technology: Lycra gloves decorated with 20 multicolored patches. The colors are not just…umm…fashionable, they also help the gesture be matched more easily to a prerecorded image database and therefore be interpreted more accurately. Will the database include images recorded of people with dexterity disabilities, people with small hands, etc.?

Wired: Gesture-Based Computing Uses $1 Lycra Gloves

Japanese drivers with left/right dyslexia have a new friend in NaviRobo, a small crab robot that syncs with the Pioneer GPS system and points its claws in the direction you’re supposed to go–a rather elegant non-verbal navigation strategy. The same idea modified into a handheld version could help deaf-blind pedestrians, too.

Gizmodo: GPS crab guides the way with highly accurate claw gestures

Toshiba is exploring artificial texture for touch screens.  By changing the charge on a surface film, the device will present the user with simulated rough, smooth, or fuzzy textures.  This could work well for blind users, who would be able to distinguish buttons and controls on a touchscreen, one of the major barriers to those ubiquitous input systems.

Toshiba brings texture to touch video — Engadget

Here’s a cool hands-free wheelchair control setup, based off a Wii remote. It’s a high school science project for now, but has tremendous potential for being a low-cost commercial strategy that could significantly improve chair design.

Engadget: Student moves quadriplegics with Wiimote wheelchair control