Have you ever been in the situation where you think “Man, I wish I could copy words or pictures from a hand-written page without rewriting!” Maybe not, but it would be a really cool ability. You wouldn’t have to draw anything more than once. In the future, we will hopefully be able to do this with our minds, or maybe our Google Glasses. That is far away though (maybe the Google Glasses 3.0?). But Fujitsu is currently working on a product called FingerLink, and it is definitely the closest thing to having a superhuman ability.

FingerLink (1)

An Image Being Manipulated By FingerLink

At its current stage of development (which is far from complete), FingerLink would probably not be something meriting a place on your desk. First of all, it’s too big. For specialized needs, however, it could definitely be a valuable device. Because of its pinpoint finger accuracy, many apps will probably appear, such as the one I described above. Here are some of it’s main features:

 

Image and Picture Clipping

Image and picture clipping is a big part of FingerLink at the current development stage. You can take any surface, curved or flat, and easily draw a line with your finger. This will highlight a square of the surface and take a “picture” of it. Then, that picture will go off to the side of the screen to be used by who-knows-what-app. This could be valuable as a substitute for pocket or smartphone scanners, and is not limited by flat surfaces.

3D Display

This may sound crazy, but FingerLink is actually very good for inspecting (and sooner or later creating) 3D models. This is also one of the products current capabilities. You can manipulate a 3D model with your hand, a lot like Leap Motion. This could make 3D models MUCH easier to use.

Picture Hiding and Pop-overs

Another existing feature, picture hiding and pop-overs, is potentially important for businesses. It allows you to secretly add text and images to any surface, so when it’s put under FingerLink, they show up. This could be useful in real estate. When looking for a new house, people grab flyers of any house they see. On those flyers could be hidden pictures of the house and other details. See what I mean? Very useful.

Overall, FingerLink is a very cool device. Scanning may never be the same. Over time, product’s size will most likely shrink, making it even more practical as an everyday device. Its capabilities, on the other hand, will expand greatly. Right now, though, I may not need it enough to justify the price, which is well above a scanner and Google SketchUp. Improvements may be on the way though, so we’ll just have to wait until fiscal 2014, when it comes out, and see.