Tattoo artists across the US, Australia, Austria and Singapore have signed up to start offering their customers augmented reality tattoos that get inked onto the skin and play audio clips when scanned by a smartphone using a mobile app that is due to be released in June 2017.

Soundwave Tattoos have been developed by startup Skin Motion and are designed from an audio recording that gets uploaded to the mobile app.

“A person uploads or records the audio they want into the app or website,” Skin Motion says. “We generate the Soundwave from that. The person takes the generated Soundwave to a tattoo artist from our artist network.

“Artists need to be licensed in order to make sure they understand the limitations of the technology and how that applies to tattoo placement, size and changes to the design of the tattoo from a simple Soundwave to make it more custom or elaborate on it for the person.

“Once the artist does the tattoo, a photo of the tattoo is uploaded to our platform. Our patent pending platform processes the audio and tattoo and adds it to the app. When the user opens our app and points the camera on their mobile device at the tattoo, it recognises the shape of the Soundwave and plays back the audio.”

A video gives an overview of how a Soundwave Tattoo works:

“We have started signing up tattoo artists to make Soundwave Tattoos and already have members in the US, Australia, Austria and Singapore,” the company adds. “A limited number of Soundwave Tattoos will be available to pre-order prior to the Skin Motion app launch in June 2017.”

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