Beauty Technology is a wearable computing paradigm that uses the body’s surface as an interactive platform by integrating technology into beauty products applied directly to one’s skin, fingernails and hair. Hairware is a Beauty Technology Prototype that connects chemically metalized hair extensions to a microcontroller turning it into an input device for triggering different objects. Hairware acts as a capacitive touch sensor that detects touch variations on hair and uses machine learning algorithms in order to recognize user’s intention. Normally, while someone touches her own hair, unconsciously she is bringing comfort to herself and at the same time is emitting a non-verbal message decodable by an observer. However, when she replays that touch on Hairware, she is not just emitting a message to an observer, because touching her hair would trigger an object, creating in this way, a concealed interface to different devices. Therefore, Hairware brings the opportunity to make conscious use of an unconscious auto-contact behavior. We present Hairware’s hardware and software implementation.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2678025.2701404
Vega, K., Cunha, M., & Fuks, H. (2015, March). Hairware: The Conscious Use of Unconscious Auto-contact Behaviors. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (pp. 78-86). ACM.