How would you like a toy, steering wheel, wall, or electric guitar with a touch pad? You probably encounter small touch screens every day—on phones and at store checkout counters, for instance—but chances are you don’t come across many touch-sensitive surfaces that are huge or aren’t completely flat. That’s because it’s expensive and tricky to add this kind of interaction to large and irregular surfaces. That could change soon, as researchers at Carnegie Mellon University say they’ve come up with a way to make many kinds of devices responsive to touch just by spraying them with conductive paint, adding electrodes, and computing where you press on them. “These previously static, non-interactive toys and objects can be interactive,” says Yang Zhang, a graduate student who led the project. Called Electrick, it can be used with materials like plastic, Jell-O, and silicone, and it could make touch tracking a lot cheaper, too, since it relies on already available paint and parts, Zhang says. The project is being presented at the CHI computer-human interaction conference in Denver this week. Zhang says the researchers bought some conductive spray paint—the one they purchased is typically used for coating electronics to lower electromagnetic interference—and sprayed a bunch of objects, including a steering wheel, a table, a toy dog, a map of the United States, and a wall. They attached electrodes to the perimeter of each object and connected the electrodes to a sensor board, which was itself connected to a laptop running software they developed.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found a way to make objects responsive to touch using conductive paint and electrodes. The system, called Elektrick, can be added to most surfaces, including plastic, silicone and even Jell-O, to make non-interactive objects touch sensitive. The team sprayed the objects with the conductive paint, attached electrodes and connected them to a sensor board and laptop, which was then able to detect touch. The method could be used to make touch technology more sensitive, as the devices were 99% accurate at determining touch and accurate to within one centimetre of touch-tracking distance.