RF Noise Can Turn Your Wall Into One Giant Touch Screen

Microsoft Engineers are planning to develop an interface technology that will turn any wall into an interactive gesture recognizing display screen. The research and development people at Microsoft have already made some progress in the area and will be coming with the prototype in the next few months. They are helped in their efforts by the students at the University of Washington. The research team is actually trying to devise a way to capture the stray abundant electromagnetic radiation field present in our surroundings and use that to operate touch sensitive user interfaces on any flat surface like a wall. The crazy sounding technology can be then used in a variety of applications like controlling various gadgets like light switches, thermostats, stereos, televisions, and security systems via any surface in the house. It may one day even be used for creating newer and unusual gaming interfaces.

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All the electromagnetic radiations are present indiscriminately in the air around us. The receivers for different gadgets have their filters and antennae tuned to particular frequencies. As a result the devices catch the radio signals useful for them. All other signals are rejected and commonly termed as noise. The noise signals are present in large amount in the urban area where the noise floor level is higher. However, Desney Tan, a senior scientist at Microsoft says that these spurious noise signals can be harnessed for the operation of their new interface provided that the signals are captured by some type of antennae. And he believes that the human body can act as an antenna for the ambient EM radiation!

The basic principle behind this project is that when a person touches a wall, he becomes an antenna tuned to harness the electromagnetic radiations. This radio signal will then be converted into an electrical signal. The amplitude and strength of the electrical signal will depend on a number of factors like body position and proximity to and location on the wall. The voltage can then be used to control a gadget in close proximity of the wall by gesture recognition techniques.

It has been demonstrated by the scientists that human body can act as a radio receiver for converting the ambient field energy into a usable form for running a gesture based interface. All the research work behind this theory will be presented as a paper in the forthcoming CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, BC.

In the initial experiments, the test subjects were provided with grounding wrist bracelets, which are usually worn to prevent the buildup of static electricity in human body. The collected signal was then sampled and digitized using an analog to digital converter. This data or information is wired to a laptop carried by the test subject in a backpack. The laptop performs the data signal processing.  If a smaller data processing unit and a real time algorithm for monitoring the changes in the signal can be created, then this technology can be an immense success. The technology is still very crude. It needs a great deal of refining. For example it needs some visual, tangible, or auditory feedback so the user knows where to touch. A simple solution is the use of stickers but that will limit its scope and will also make your walls messy. So efforts are needed by the team in this direction. One more problem is that the signals will vary depending on how a user wears the grounding strap which may lead to erroneous operation. So if all these barriers could be overcome, then this interface could replace the remote controls and gaming consoles in the house.

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