Artist's concept of New horizons (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The digital world is escaping. It’s escaping everywhere–onto your desk, into your lap, into your pocket. It’s escaping around your wrist to track your physical fitness. It’s escaping into your bathroom scale. It’s been looking at you from all manner of webcams for years.
Now the digital world is on your walls. Well, not yet actually. But the precursor is there; interface is escaping to your walls. An interface for controlling electric things. You know, turn things on or off just by touching the wall–no more fumbling for the switch in the middle of the night.
From there it’s just a few simple Arduino kits away from the very walls of your domicile being extensions of the digital realm. There’s no turning back.
Test your French and read some of the articles about this new electric paint project from Nicolas Triboulot.
Or let me give you the skinny:
- Drill a hole in a wall for the On/Off Paint sensor.
- Use the On/Off Paint to cover the wall in whatever pattern you like so long as it also touches that hole you drilled in step 1.
- Insert the On/Off Paint sensor (which results in a small nondescript white plate sticking out of the wall, about like a light switch without the switch).
- The sensor then can be matched to control electric circuits via wireless communications. In other words, that sensor can be behind the couch.
- Go ahead and paint over the On/Off Paint with whatever color you like, or wallpaper or whatever.
- Whenever someone touches the part of the wall with the On/Off Paint then the switch is thrown on the matched electric circuits.
The creators of this stuff suggest using it to control things like lights and alarms and all sorts of normal stuff. But there’s any manner of electric and digital things you could control if you wanted to and were crafty enough.
Light switches are so 1900s. It’s all about the tactile surface now.
