Now, turn any surface into touchscreen using spray paint

Washington: Scientists have developed a new technology that can turn any surface - including walls, furniture and steering wheels - into a touch screen using tools as simple as a can of spray paint.

The "trick" is to apply electrically conductive coatings or materials to objects or surfaces, or to craft objects using conductive materials, researchers said.

By attaching a series of electrodes to the conductive materials, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University in the US showed they could use a well-known technique called electric field tomography to sense the position of a finger touch.

For the first time, we have been able to take a can of spray paint and put a touch screen on almost anything," said Chris Harrison, assistant professor at Carnegie's Human- Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).

Until now, large touch surfaces have been expensive and irregularly shaped, or flexible touch surfaces have been largely available only in research labs. Some methods have relied on computer vision, which can be disrupted if a camera's view of a surface is blocked.

The presence of cameras also raises privacy concerns. With the new technology dubbed Electrick, conductive touch surfaces can be created by applying conductive paints, bulk plastics or carbon-loaded films among other materials.

Yang Zhang, PhD student at HCII, said that Electrick is both accessible to hobbyists and compatible with common manufacturing methods, such as spray coating, vacuum forming and casting/molding, as well as 3D printing.

Like many touchscreens, Electrick relies on the shunting effect - when a finger touches the touchpad, it shunts a bit of electric current to ground.

By attaching multiple electrodes to the periphery of an object or conductive coating, Zhang and his colleagues showed they could localise where and when such shunting occurs.

They did this by using electric field tomography - sequentially running small amounts of current through the electrodes in pairs and noting.

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