Is that a Mobile Device You’re Stroking in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me

Microsoft Research might need to be a little careful with its naming and branding of some of its projects and technology. Designed to allow users to control their mobile devices while they remain in their pockets, this technology, PocketTouch, can track gestures using Microsoft’s digital Ink handwriting recognition system and preset gestures.

The full name of the project is called PocketTouch: Through-Fabric Capacitive Touch Input. The idea is to allow you to control your phone without removing it from your pocket, but I would imagine this needs quite a bit of behind the scenes work given our different clothing and fabrics can be and indeed that’s described somewhat in the post linked above.

You can check out a video of this prototype here.