Microsoft to turn your flat into a control pad
Interact with your wiring
Microsoft is developing technology that turns wall surfaces in every room of a house into control panels for videogames and appliances.
Unlike Xbox 360 accessory Kinect, which tracks movement through a built-in camera, Microsoft's latest tech tunes into electromagnetic fields leaking out of home wiring.
Presented this week at Vancouver's Conference on Human Factors in Computing, the system uses a sensor device, worn on the neck or wrist, to monitor around a thousand different frequencies and how they change as the wearer's body moves within the EM field.
The upshot: the system can look for and detect various gestures - hands down by the wearer's sides, touch the wall and so forth - and see where in the house they were made.
The data could then the be transmitted wirelessly to a control hub, interpreted and used to trigger events, from switching lights on and off, to operating the central heating, the TV and so forth.
Head researcher Desney Tan says the tech may be offered open source to amateur engineers, just as Kinect was (eventually), to broaden application and give everyone the chance to make products that use this touch-controlled surface technology.
I guess those walls needed repainting anyway...
You can read the full paper here (PDF) ®
COMMENTS
It Looks Like You Want To Turn The Light On
Would you like help with that?
Well maybe this comment is a little silly
Hell no! The last thing I want is a piece of Microsoft technology controlling my household gadgets. Seriously, this is not a joke comment, I'm for real!
Microsoft you suck so hard, you can't make anything that actually works properly, your advertising campaigns are an embarrassment and your company name sounds like a medical condition that middle aged not-well-endowed men suffer from!
Well maybe this comment is a little silly but then again so is the idea of touching a bloody wall next to a light switch to turn the blooming lights on!
Paris, cos she lights up too when you touch her wall.
Scared to move?
You could be constantly adjusting the TV volume, and while the other half and kids are asleep upstairs that is never a good idea.
Obviously, because it'll wake them up...nothing to do with the A/V content you'd be enjoying at the time.
Neverless, it'd be funny to get a device to play a short trumpet sound and a laughter track every time your face hits a surface, eg: when you trip over the cat and smack your head off the table.
Honestly, from the photo...
I thought it was a guy at the urinal.
Arthur C. Clarke again
3001: A Space Odyssey?
Mr. Clarke was there with this and augmented reality years ago...
