Sometimes you have to take your hat off to the boffins for coming up with something genuinely innovative, and this new concept product is one of those. The NailO is a nail sticker which fits over a thumb and converts your digit to a full blown trackpad. It’s the brainchild of the geeks at MIT – we’re rather surprised it’s not a crazy Kickstarter project yet – and it looks to have real potential.

The device can be ‘styled’ with the user’s preferred nail art design, and once worn, you can use it to navigate around your mobile phone or trackpad on demand. Swiping screens, scrolling pages and even long press zoom are all supported, but the real miracle is they’ve managed to squeeze all this clever tech into something that small.

The developers give a bunch of example demo videos, including a jewelry controller, but the application we like most is the one where you’re sitting in a boring meeting scrolling your way through your Reddit feed with the barest move of a finger. Yay for stealth tech.

The developers have tweaked battery life to a full 2 hours use, but say that this can probably be increased significantly with some careful optimization, including sleep modes. We’re thinking, yeah bring it on, although we’re told we shouldn’t expect to see anything for sale for a couple of years at least. Nice.

[Via]