The artificial skin developed by researchers from the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore could be able to identify objects it has not yet touched.
The team demonstrated that the artificial skin could be used in a variety of applications, including the manipulation of virtual game characters, navigation of electronic maps, and scrolling through electronic documents.
“Human skin has to touch something to tell it what is there,” said researcher Yifan Wang. “Human skin can only tell the softness or hardness of an object. We wanted our artificial skin to have more functions.”
Even without touching an object, Wang and his colleagues´ artificial skin can sense if it is close by and can also discern some clues about the type of material it is made of.
“We can tell whether it’s a piece of metal, plastic… or some biological material,” he said.
The skin was made from two outer layers of conductive fabric coated with nickel to serve as electrodes. The...