Disclaimer: CHI is a multiple track conference, with a dozen of parallel sessions, so the truth is: I’ve never felt a bigger desire for ubiquity (the great thing is that this year things are being recorded and will be on the ACM Digital Library soon. Thanks to the SVs for filming the talks!)

In the third day of CHI a lot of attention was given to future interfaces that attach directly to the users’ body. The great thing is that being a research conference, CHI goes much further than the wearables and smartwatch industry so researches here presented developments in haptic wearables that control your muscles (an example of that is my own work presented this year), rings that notify you using temperature (Notiring), interactive tattoo-like stickers that allow you to interact directly onto your skin (iSkin), and even nail covers that allow you to secretly interact with your technology (NailO)!

Some future interfaces that live on your body: a bracelet that reads and writes to your muscles and a Nail interface:

Of course the CHI community is not only about new hardware but a much broader and grounded on the understanding of Computing and Human Factors. This means over the past three days we’ve seen many explorations and studies that provide a deeper understanding of the world of ergonomics, crowd-sourcing, collaborative work, interaction techniques, and human cognition too.

Furthermore, this year there has been an amazing body of work that takes the CHI community to the real world as discusses important, real-world questions, such as “Encouraging Energy Conservation”, “Gender inclusive Software” and a great focus (as always) in making HCI (and CHI) accessible to all people!