Lip-Licking Controller Lets You Navigate Daily Activities Hands-Free

People—or cartoon characters, at least—lick their lips when they’re about to tuck into a delicious meal or are deeply focused at work. Beyond these, there’s not much else that’s associated with innocent tongue action. Researchers at the University of Chicago, however, are anticipating a future where licking your lips can help facilitate your life, especially if you’re somebody with limited mobility who doesn’t have full access to their hands or eyes.

The teammates, namely Arata Jingu, Yudai Tanaka, and Prof Pedro Lopes, have reimagined lip and tongue movements as inputs for an alternative user interface they call ‘LipIO’. The weightless attachment, which is made of a thin and flexible plastic sheet and other materials you can snag off the shelf, is adhered to the skin and receives signals via electrical stimulation.

The device gets its input from touches of the tongue or lower lip. A single tap from the tip of your tongue, for example, is akin to pressing a button. You could also glide your tongue across your upper lip just like moving along a slider.

Although LipIO delivers its most benefits to people with disabilities, its use cases transcend the community.

In a video, the researchers demonstrate that the lip controller can be used to open, close, and then lock smart doors when your hands are busy.

They also show LipIO functioning as an app to tune your guitar while your fingers are on the strings, and even as a way to pull up GPS information when you’re riding a bicycle.

And it doesn’t stop in the physical world. LipIO has surprising applications in virtual reality too, potentially acting as a simulator to disperse basic tastes like sweet, sour, salty, and bitter through electrical impulses. The team cites “virtual ice cream” as one idea to make the metaverse more convincing and enjoyable.

Considering LipIO’s profound potential, it’s great to know that the researchers have open-sourced the project so others can have a (literal) taste of this technology.

The key gripe is that LipIO needs to be hooked up to several wires, making it less friendly than it is intended to be. That could change with the many more brilliant minds that may contribute to the expansion of its readily-accessible blueprint.

Granted, it’s also a tad awkward to be licking your lips in public all the time. As such, the trio is now working to reduce the frequency of lip-licking so as to prevent embarrassing scenarios.

[via Engadget, Hackster.io, SIGCHI, video and images via Arata Jingu, Yudai Tanaka, and Pedro Lopes / University of Chicago’s HCIntegration]