No more fumbling for light switches in the dark. By applying a layer of conducting paint researchers at the Disney Research lab in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Carnegie Mellon University have developed a cheap technology called Wall++ that converts walls into surfaces that can sense touch and swiped gestures. It can even detect what devices are being used in a room.
A conducting nickel-based layer is painted on as a grid and costs just $20 per square metre 鈥� roughly the same as low-cost wallpaper. This sensor array is then covered up with standard paint.
Wall++ gets rid of the need for light switches, volume controls and thermostats, says Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon University. These can instead be controlled by swiping in pre-defined areas. And if a movie or video game is projected onto the wall, it could be controlled via touch buttons assigned to parts of the makeshift screen.
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The smart walls can also act as antennas, picking up electro-magnetic signals emitted by nearby gadgets and appliances. This lets the walls identify and locate devices in a room, such as hairdryers or food blenders. The team suggests this data could be fed to a home assistant like Amazon Alexa, letting it know what else you were interacting with. This would give the home assistant more context to understand what you said to it.
鈥淭his low-cost sensing approach opens up exciting new design possibilities,鈥� says Aaron Quigley at the University of St Andrews in the UK. 鈥淭he fabric of the environment has the sensing in place.鈥�
He suggests they could be installed in hospital rooms so that small gestures could be used to call for a doctor, for example. 鈥淥r placing a walking frame next to the wall could lead to an automatic call for nursing support.鈥�
The team presented Wall++ last week at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Montreal, Canada.
