Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- In Chris Harrison's ideal world, mobile phones would be the size of matchbooks. They'd have full-size keyboards. They'd browse the Web. They'd play videos.
And, most importantly, you'd never have to touch them.
Sound like too much to ask? Maybe not.
Harrison, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University and a former intern at Microsoft Research, has developed a working prototype of a system called Skinput that does just that, essentially by turning a person's hand and forearm into a keyboard and screen.
"People don't love the iPhone keyboard. They use them. But they don't love them," Harrison said in a interview at the recent Computer-Human Interaction conference. "If you could make the iPhone keyboard as big as an arm -- that would be huge."
Using Skinput, a person could tap their thumb and middle finger together to answer a call; touch their forearm to go to the next track on a music player; or flick the center of their palm to select a menu item...
