You may have heard about different kinds of smart gadgets available in the market or are in development. Technology has reached to our homes. We can see various home-based appliances have intelligence for the convenience of the user. It ranges from smaller smartphones, door appliances, cameras to big home and kitchen appliances. However, do you ever think your walls can be smart as well in future? If not then the answer is yes.
We will soon get familiar with context sensing walls that can help us to control our smart home by activating it with few taps on the same. As per the latest report of NBC news, there is continuous research on making home walls smarter. It is happening at Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University. Good news is it will not cost a hefty amount, since it will be available at the cost of $20 per meter.
What is the Mystery behind the Wall?
The project is named as Dubbed Wall++. Researchers are trying to turn an ordinary wall into a gesture sensing touchpad. It is done using electrodes created from custom sensor board and conductive paint. The wall will be having an electromagnetic sensor to found and track electrical appliances and devices.
How much Helpful the Smart Walls will be for us?
As the name suggests smart walls can have some intelligence to sense and analyse the home activities. It can do many tasks similar to what many in-house robots are doing currently. A smart wall can be used for many activities such as:
- To track electromagnetic signature emitted from people containing electronic devices in their clothes.
- To track and send notify the user about the status of an appliance.
- To adjust the light levels automatically once a TV has been switched OFF or ON.
- To detect and monitor the activities of a Room.
The research team at Carnegie Mellon are working from a long time on similar projects. A project that helps them to turn an average analogue surface into a touchpad. Last year they announced a system known as Electrick. It is based on converting standard smooth surfaces into touch controls by spraying conductive paint on the same surface.
How much will it take for the Walls to be in our Homes?
At present, there are certain limitations to this project on which the research team is working to solve them. One of them is there should be a more natural way to install a smart wall other than installing a sensor board on the baseboard. It has been done while maintaining the general functionality as it is.
Another limitation is the wall++ needs to optimise in a better way so that it will consume electricity up to an impressive level for its success. Once such issues are solved, we do not need to wait much in making our home completely smart.
Hence, be prepared to talk and communicate with your walls especially if you are mostly alone in your home. If you don’t like robots to wander here and there after you then you might be happy with this news!