Autodesk research is developing a “Magic Finger” that turns any surface into a touch interface by shifting the touch technology from the surface to the wearer’s finger.

A sense of touch This bionic finger uses touch to “see” inside human tissue, electronics Subsurface tactile tomography can detect details beneath a material's surface.

What sets this robot finger apart is its ability to localize touch with very high precision (<1 mm) over large, multi-curved 3D surfaces, much like a human hand, according to the engineers.

A Sensorized Multicurved Robot Finger with Data-driven Touch Sensing via Overlapping Light Signals. IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2020; 1 DOI: 10.1109/TMECH.2020.2975578 ...

I love 3D Touch, but FingerAngle, by Carnegie Mellon spin-off Qeexo, may have just upped the ante. The researchers behind FingerAngle, a new algorithm that allows smartphones to estimate the ...

Using computer vision techniques, the system “turns touch into an image,” says Johnson, allowing it to map surface features in 3D and measure them down to the single-digit micron level.