Hi, I'm Scientific American

Toddcast Editor Steve Mursky.

And here's a short piece from the July 2018 issue of the magazine

in the section called Advances, Dispat from the frontiers of science, technology, and medicine.

Smart Walls by Pratchee Patel

The right paint can add pizzazz to your walls and now it can also make them smarter.

Researchers recently converted a wall into an outsized trackpad and motion sensor by using low-cost conductive paint to create a large

grid of electrodes. Such a smart wall can sense human touch and track gestures

from a short distance.

It can also detect the locations of appliances and whether they're switched on.

The technology could someday turn on lights when a person enters a room,

track a player's motion in an interactive video game,

or monitor a child's television use.

Yang Jang, a computer science doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, helped to create the concept. and to a 12 by 8 foot wall, then coated it with commercially available conductive nickel paint.

Removing the tape left a pattern of diamond shaped electrodes, which the researchers connected

using a grid of thin copper tape strips.

They affixed a vinyl sticker in the middle of each diamond to insulate the electrodes from

one another.

Finally, they wired the strips to a custom built circuit board and cover the wall with

standard latex paint. The entire project took four hours and cost less than

$200.

Zhang and his colleagues at Disney Research presented the Wall at the CHI Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems in Montreal.

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