Nokia Nenya - control your cellphone by a ring on your finger | Hacker News Reader

Nokia Nenya - control your cellphone by a ring on your finger

blog.jitbit.com

15 pointsjitbit12 comments

They should probably stop fucking around and start building a real business again.

The need for the bracelet makes this a lot less attractive than it could be. I've been waiting for ring-based UIs since Pratchett's The Dark Side Of The Sun.

For example: contactless smart cards. Put them in ring form. Then you just have to wave your hand at the reader for them to work.

This tickles my LOTR bone. Good old Galadriel's ring. Nice nice.

The actual product seems a bit shit though. Not to mention pointless.

I'm not sure how that would be much more practical than just having a special interface on your watch to interact with your phone (buttons or a touch screen for instance).

"a real concept product"

Oh, the irony.

That's either a really sensitive watch or the ring produces a large magnetic field.

It's a concept, which means that the magnetic field explanation is very much akin to the flimsy pretexts used by science fiction shows to provide some plausible sort of excuse for how something like this might perhaps work maybe.

Concepts are basically what happens when a person who can draw goes "dude, wouldn't it be awesome if X?".

No, it's not: http://research.nokia.com/files/public/2011-01-12-Ashbrook-C... [pdf]

Ah, then the article was wrong to call it one.

The article says the magnetic field is detected by a bracelet which in turn communicates via Bluetooth to the phone.

...which begs the question, why not just control the phone via the bracelet directly if the user needs some kind of remote control facility?

Via New Scientist, and posted by jitbit without information added. Hmmm.

now that Nokia's going WinMo, these companies should try some Kinectish interfaces.

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