You know the universal hand signal for a telephone? You know you can talk into your pinky finger and listen to the other end of the conversation on your thumb? YOu want to have an Inspector Gadget or James Bond like communication experience? Look no further than the Color Rings by BCK design team.
Instead of latching a traditional Bluetooth headset onto your ear, you wear a pair of rings on your hands. One ring goes on your pinky finger and this acts as the microphone. The other ring goes on your thumb and it acts as the earpiece. Yes, this is the same universal hand signal among surfers for being gnarly.
To make the functionality even more whimsical (and possibly very usable), the way that you answer an incoming call is to make that characteristic “phone” sign with your hand. The two rings detect the increased distance between them and then they pick up the call. To hang up, close your hand back into a fist.
If we were to continue with this line of thinking, wouldn’t it make more sense to have accelerometers placed in the rings that would detect when you were hanging up your make-believe phone on a make-believe base station? You know, like pointing your hand downward with the phone-hand configuration intact?
Either way, this is very weird and still just a design concept. I wonder if anyone at Nokia, Motorola, or Apple is paying attention.