New Smart Wall for Smart Homes

Smart homes are getting smarter and smarter. The Wall++ offers a new way to control smart homes, one that doesn’t involve repeating phrases to a smart speaker.

Wall++

The Wall++ was developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research. They created a way to make the walls of a smart home into gesture-sensing touchpads. They used conductive paint and a custom sensor board to create electrodes to turn walls into an “electromagnetic sensor to detect and track electrical devices and appliances.”

What’s so great about a smart wall? Researchers say the wall system could monitor activity in rooms, send alerts when an appliance goes off, adjust lights, and control televisions. It can also track people who are wearing certain electronic devices that emit an electromagnetic signature.

The Wall++ is an idea that built off of Carnegie Mellon’s previous work in a system called Electrick. Electrick took the first step in spraying conductive paint onto smooth surfaces to enable touch controls.

Smart Wall Could Replace Smart Speaker Systems

Home smart speakers are popular, but Carnegie Mellon researchers predict the smart wall could be an improvement and become more popular.

It will be some time before the Wall++ is available to the public, however. Researchers are currently installing prototypes by putting a sensor board in the wall’s baseboard, but they think they can make improvements for easier installation. They also have aims to optimize the Wall++’s energy consumption. Overall, the Wall++ is looking to be extremely promising for the future of smart homes.