With just a can of spray paint, researchers can turn flat surfaces of any shape or size —ranging from walls to furniture to even musical instruments — into touchpads, according to a new study.
The technique, dubbed Electrick by its inventors from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, relies on electrodes attached to an object made of or coated with any slightly conductive material. While not as precise as smartphone touch-screen technology, the resulting touchpads are still accurate enough to allow basic control functions, such as using a slider or pushing a button, the researchers said.
"The technology is very similar to how touch screens work," said Yang Zhang, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). "When the user's finger touches on an electric field, it will shunt a fraction of the current to the ground, and by tracking where the shunting of the current happens, we can track where the user touches the surface."
Goals of this Technology:
"The goal of this technology is to enable touch sensing on everything," Zhang said. "Touch has been very successful. It's a very intuitive way to interact with computer resources. So, we were wondering whether we could enable these touch-sensing capabilities in many more objects other than just phones and tablets."
How it Works :
"It wouldn't work with normal plastic, which is totally nonconductive," Zhang said. "But we can use various carbon-loaded materials, materials that have carbon particles inside them, which make them slightly conductive."
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