I'd love to see this applied to guns where you have to make a much more intentioned grip for the safety to be disabled.
a gun that senses it is being held in a weird way will not fire.
I think the first application will be on a mouse. A mouse that has multi-dimensional touch features would be great.
This will also make creating an interface to control things like the whole house very easy. Basically enabling complex control of a full building's BMS easily.
Is that a big problem? Why don't the gun owners who perceive that as a problem use the safety or buy a gun with greater trigger pressure? If they don't do those things, why would they want to pay to add this feature?
Gun owner loses concentration for a second. Safe is left unlocked. Child gains access to firearm. Child mimics television and pulls the trigger. Childs hands are too small/weak, firearm is heavy, grip on firearm is frail, gun does not fire.
It's not really a big problem in the grand scheme of things. If you follow the 4 safe behaviors(google it if necessary) it's pretty much impossible to have an accidental discharge.
But mistakes happen (and idiots happen), and occasionally someone has an accidental discharge while handling or cleaning.
I think where this would really shine is for user recognition/unlock as mentioned by a previous poster. There have already been attempts at user recognition, but those relied on magnetic rings or RFID chips.
> but if this can be applied, it may easily reduce it.
Or, it can result in more dead people.
Guns that don't go off when the trigger is pulled get people killed.
FWIW, "cleaning their gun" is usually cop for "the family doesn't need the stigma of a suicide ane needs the insurance money if any".
There's also some evidence that a lot of the "kid found a gun" are successful murders (by parents) or, at best, depraved indifference. The families that have them are usually "interesting".
IIRC, the stuff about kids is in Gary Kleck's "Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America" although there was probably some stuff in Philip Cook's "Gun Control".
I stopped reading the research 10-15 years ago, long after it became clear that the research didn't have any effect on people's positions.
The other good source is "Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and Their Firearms" by Wright and Rossi. They were tasked by the Carter administration with gathering the available research to prove that gun control worked.
There has been a lot research on grasp detection and interpretation over the last 10 years. Touché is just a new sensing technique, not a new interaction paradigm.
or how about guns that won't fire because you aren't the registered owner (or approved on 'firing list' of some sort, in the case of, let's say, a wife that's home alone when a burglar comes).
I dislike that analogy. A "special grip" is analogous to a secret handshake or code, whereas fingerprints and retinal patterns are intrinsic and immutable body characteristics.
In fact, wouldn't an actual fingerprint scanner be more effective for this purpose? Having used biometric readers, I frankly would not trust my life to one. Nonetheless, it [fingerprint reader] would be infinitely preferable to any technique that required fine motor control in high adrenaline situations.
edit : this thread made me instantly think of Judge Dredd.
a gun that senses it is being held in a weird way will not fire.
I think the first application will be on a mouse. A mouse that has multi-dimensional touch features would be great.
This will also make creating an interface to control things like the whole house very easy. Basically enabling complex control of a full building's BMS easily.