As a typical millennial, my cell phone is essentially attached to my body─another limb if you will. Our phones do so much more than many ever imagined they would, and now, some researchers are identifying the current limitations of mobile devices and envisioning even more capabilities.
Marc Teyssier, Gilles Bailly, Catherine Pelachaud and Eric Lecolinet, researchers from Telecom ParisTech (Université Paris Saclay), HCI team of ISIR (Sorbonne Université) and CNRS, embarked on a research project doing just that. The project is being presented at UIST 2018, 31st ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium this week.
The group of researchers noticed the static and motionless limitations of mobile devices and developed a robotic limb, MobiLimb, to overcome them. Their approach preserves the form factor and I/O efficiency of mobile devices and adds new ones by attaching a robotic device to the phone.
“The users can manipulate and deform the robotic device (input); they can see and feel it (visual and haptic feedback), including when its shape is dynamically modified by the mobile device; and as a robotic manipulator, it can support additional modular elements (LED, shells, proximity sensors),” the project’s website explains.