'Living' Walls Created at MIT

Interactive walls are not something entirely new. Attempts at producing aesthetically pleasing designs in an electronic fashion are fairly old, but most of the previous approaches to accomplishing this rely on very power-hungry sensors and projectors. This makes the wallpapers an unfeasible alternative to their paper counterparts. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab have recently discovered a new approach to constructing the amazing walls that allows them to control other electrical devices, such as lamps, heaters, and even music systems, NewScientist reports.

According to expert Leah Buechley, the leader of the MIT team, the new type of wallpaper relies on magnetic and conductive paints to create electrical circuits right on the walls. The circuits can then be used to control virtually anything that has electricity flowing through it, and all of this is done with just a minimal power consumption. Their design is also one of the first ever that incorporates a Bluetooth device into a wall, alongside LEDs. The lights are used for visual feedback on various actions.

The walls also contain minimally expensive temperature, touch and brightness sensors. This means that you can set the wallpaper to start the heater as soon as the temperature in the room drops under a certain threshold. Activating the lights or the music becomes a matter of simply touching one of the flowers on the wallpaper, while selecting a song can be done by moving a leaf around. “Our goal is to make technologies that users can build on and change without needing a lot of technical skill,” Buechley says. “You can go up and touch the wall and not even feel a tingle,” the expert adds.

The system runs at just 20 volts, she shares, and draws only about 2.5 amps when fully loaded with electronic devices. The wallpaper is made of a steel foil, placed between sheets of paper that have been infused with magnetic paint – acrylic paint infused with iron particles. Over this substrate, the motifs of the wallpaper – flowers and whatnot – are laid down, using conductive paint. The latter uses copper particles rather than iron, and thus forms circuits under the patterns, to which sensors, lights and other electronic devices can be attached.