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The human hand is an amazing machine that can pick up, move and place objects easily, but for a robot, this "gripping" mechanism is a vexing challenge. Opting for simple elegance, researchers from Cornell University, University of Chicago, and iRobot have bypassed traditional designs based around the human hand and fingers, and created a versatile gripper using everyday ground coffee and a latex party balloon.

Instead of practicing for hours, a device can now teach you a tune by taking control of your hand (see video above). The system, developed by the University of Tokyo and Sony Computer Science Laboratories, is appropriately named PossessedHand and electrically stimulates muscles in your arm that move your fingers. Tests have shown that the device can help you learn the correct fingering faster but many find the concept unsettling. Would you be willing to have your hand hacked to learn an instrument?

A unique optical multitouch sensing technology using infrared sensors has been developed by researchers at the Interface Ecology Lab at Texas A&M University. ZeroTouch allows users to literally draw pictures in midair. It provides zero-force, zero-thickness, high-frame-rate, high-resolution, transparent multitouch sensing. ZeroTouch's new forms of free-air interaction are more precise than the Microsoft Kinect, the researchers said. ZeroTouch was demonstrated at the recent ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, B.C. Ref: Moeller, J. and Kerne, A., ZeroTouch: A Zero-Thickness Optical Multi-Touch Force Field, CHI 2011 Ref: Moeller, J., Lupfer, N., Hamilton, B., Lin, H., Kerne, A., intangibleCanvas: Free-Air Finger Painting on a Projected Canvas, CHI