GET READY to start touching yourself a whole lot more when using your computer.

Chris Harrison, a third year PhD student at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, is preparing to present the findings of his research into touch technology and demonstrate it at the same time.

Chris is already showing his work so far on his blog and proudly displays where you might want to be touching - your forearm, along with some of the reasons you might want to be touching it for.

"Appropriating the human body as an input device is appealing not only because we have roughly two square meters of external surface area, but also because much of it is easily accessible by our hands (e.g., arms, upper legs, torso)," said Harrison. "Furthermore, proprioception (our sense of how our body is configured in three-dimensional space) allows us to accurately interact with our bodies in an eyes-free manner. For example, we can readily flick each of our fingers, touch the tip of our nose, and clap our hands together without visual assistance. Few external input devices can claim this accurate, eyes-free input characteristic and provide such a large interaction area." Oh.

A paper will be released April 12 to support the research and discuss the Skinput input method, but in the meantime you can view some photos and videos of a man touching himself on the arm, here. µ