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Wall++ Paint Transforms Walls Into Interactive Touchpads

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University  introduce a low-cost sensing approach called Wall++. They used conductive paint to create electrodes across the surface of a wall, enabling it to act both as a touchpad to track users' touch and an electromagnetic sensor to detect and track electrical devices and appliances. The electrode wall can operate in two modes - capacitive sensing and electromagnetic (EM) sensing. In capacitive sensing, the wall functions like a capacitive touchpad: when a person touches the wall, the touch distorts the wall's electrostatic field at that point. In EM sensing mode, the electrode can detect the distinctive electromagnetic signatures of electrical or electronic devices, enabling the system to identify the devices and their locations.

Topics:
Computers Electronics & Computers Energy Monitoring Sensors Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 human environments are typify by walls houses offices restaurants schools museums walls are everywhere and yet they are inactive their primary function is to be a wall separating spaces and hiding infrastructure we see this as a missed opportunity what if walls could be a smart infrastructure instead of merely separating spaces could walls enhance

    00:00:26 rooms with sensing interactivity and computation in this research we describe a low-cost and easily applied wall treatment that can transform any room into a rich sensor our wall treatment costs roughly twenty dollars in materials per square meter and can be applied without any specialty tools after a wall is painted it connects to our custom sensor board we measure

    00:00:49 mutual capacitance between every row and column pairs much like a smartphone touchscreen which provides a matrix of values that allows a wall to sense the distance to capacitive objects such as a user's hands or body this immediately enables room-scale touch sensing opportunities including hover tracking and even gesture sensing if a user is sufficiently close to a wall we can even

    00:01:14 estimate user pose [Music] our enhanced waltz can also act as passive antennas able to capture electric magnetic noise emanating from active appliances in a room we can recognize several at the same time offering a rich source of context-sensitive information we can also use our room scale array to

    00:01:43 localize and track appliances in use [Music] for more details please refer to our paper [Music] you