‘Ear Switch’ Earbuds Control Gadgets With Nothing But Your Ridiculous Facial Expressions

Utilising infrared sensors to measure contortions in your ear canals, the ‘Ear Switch’ earbuds can guess at your facial expressions, letting you control your gadgets—iPods, mobile phones, whatever—with what pretty much amount to feigned seizures.

Inventor Kazuhiro Taniguchi is pretty stoked about the technology, but seems unable to come up with applications that aren’t completely hilarious. For example, he tells Physorg:

You will be able to turn on room lights or swing your washing machine into action with a quick twitch of your mouth… An iPod can start or stop music when the wearer sticks his tongue out, like in the famous Einstein picture. If he opens his eyes wide, the machine skips to the next tune. A wink with the right eye makes it go back.

In other words, skipping more than a track or two will be hard, unless you have epilepsy. Anyway, Apple, please keep me entertained on the bus for the next five years—include this as standard with all iPods, stat. [Physorg]