【Stocking Girl’s Wet Pink Petals】

You can Stocking Girl’s Wet Pink Petalsdo just about anything with your smartphone—if you've got a free hand or two, of course.

Sure, there've been great strides in accessibility features for those who can't control their phones by swiping around the touchscreen interface, like built-in AI assistants like Siri or Bixby and other hands-free control options—but they depend on voice commands.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

A project led by German PhD student Denys Matthies looks to give us even more hands-free control over our phones with new hardware that could send out your favorite 😬 emoji just by flashing a quick smile IRL. The tech, currently being tested in prototype form, is built into something you're probably already used to wearing for much of the day: earbuds.

SEE ALSO: There's now an animated poop-emoji keyboard and we hope you're not eating right now

The buds are outfitted with electrodes that can detect and identify different facial muscle movements from changes in the shape of a wearer's ear canal. Those readings are then used to send input commands to the phone.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

“We’re not trying to replace current input methods, just complement them,” Matthies said in an interview with New Scientist. The facial sensing buds could potentially end up as an entirely new way to control your smartphone, using a mix of voice and touch commands and even AR camera features.

The current version of the prototype can detect five expressions at a 90 percent success rate: smiling, winking, turning the head to the right, opening the mouth, and making a “shh” sound. It's not quite the entire range of human expression—what about the 🙃 emoji?—but it's a start. The system's slightly less accurate when its wearers are on the move, boasting an 85.2 percent success rate.

Matthies and his team have written at length about their work, and plan to present the prototype at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Denver next month.

There's no way to know if and when the tech could make its way to your favorite brand of earbuds—and for now, Matthias told New Scientistit's still just a research project. There's no word of any partnerships yet, or if the team will strike out on their own to create the buds themselves.

But Matthies thinks the tech will be possible soon—so when you walk by someone on the street wearing earbuds and grinning at nothing in particular in the future, there's a chance they're maybe just sending out a happy text. There are worse reasons to smile, after all.

---

Featured Video For You

---

This company is microchipping its workers to give them an all-access pass to the office

---

Topics Earbuds Facial Recognition

• Social Good
• Shopping
• Games
• Entertainment
• Science
• Deals
• Life
• Digital Culture

• Best headphones deal: Save up to 51% on Beats at Amazon
• Tourists flock to see Donald Trump
• Google bans embedded in
• After an Easter terror attack, Sri Lanka cuts access to social media
• Useful or Little Known Android Features
• Google bans embedded in
• Drone discovers a Hawaiian plant that was thought to be extinct
• Lyft adds a color
• The 10 Most Anticipated PC Games of 2017
• Bitmoji Bible tries to make religion more appealing to young people

• Silicon Valley Hustling: An Interview with Anna Wiener by Pete Tosiello
• Redux: Knowing It Would End by The Paris Review
• A Slap in the Face of Stalinism by Alissa Valles
• Yasmin Ahmad’s Multicultural Malaysia by Tash Aw
• OpenAI releases ChatGPT data leak patch, but the issue isn't completely fixed
• Grindr Unwrapped reveals the defining gay pop culture moments of 2023
• How to watch Duke vs. Troy football livestreams: kickoff time, streaming deals, and more
• Where to buy Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 before Apple stops selling them (for now)
• 'Roblox' celebrates Christmas by bringing 'Elf' to life
• Redux: Two Eyes That Are the Sunset of Two Knees by The Paris Review

• Best portable power station deal: Save $179.01 on the EcoFlow River 2 Max
• Apple needs Qualcomm to make a 5G iPhone anytime soon, experts say
• Gavin DeGraw falls on the ice after NHL national anthem performance
• SiriusXM releases a subscription plan for people without cars
• What cracked the Milky Way's giant cosmic bone? Scientists think they know.
• Google to serve up rival apps to Android users as part of EU deal
• Samsung will investigate the Galaxy Fold's screen problems
• Bodybuilding bro who filmed himself eating placenta did it for the gains
• Best Hydro Flask deal: Save $10 on a 24
• Hulu's 'Ramy' is an excellent and poignant new age dramedy

• Creator job opportunities grew 7x in recent years [April 2025]
• The 5 most surprising things from Donald Trump's '60 Minutes' interview
• Leave it to the internet to troll the supermoon
• Hulu's 'Ramy' is an excellent and poignant new age dramedy
• 5 Ways to Access a Locked Windows Account
• Tourists flock to see Donald Trump
• The CIA is about to launch an Instagram account
• Netflix is testing a shuffle option, but only on Android
• Best JBL deal: Save $80 on JBL Xtreme 4 portable speaker
• Genesis Mint is the cutest electric concept car for city living