科学美国人60秒 SSS 将墙变成触摸屏其实很便宜（在线收听）

Hi, I'm Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mirsky. And here's a short piece from the July 2018 issue of the magazine, in the section called Advances: Dispatches from the Frontiers of Science, Technology and Medicine.

大家好，我是《科学美国人》播客编辑史蒂夫·米尔斯基。下面是收录在本杂志2018年7月刊“进展：科学、技术和医学前沿快报”栏目中的一篇短文。

Smart Walls by Prachi Patel

《智能墙》 作者：普拉杰·帕特尔

The right paint can add pizazz to your walls—and now it can also make them smarter. Researchers recently converted a wall into an outsize trackpad and motion sensor by using low-cost conductive paint to create a large grid of electrodes.

合适的油漆能令你的墙面增加光彩——现在还能让墙面更加智能。最近，研究人员用低成本导电涂料创造了一个大型电极网格，将一面墙变成了一个特大号触控板和运动传感器。

Such a smart wall can sense human touch and track gestures from a short distance. It can also detect the locations of appliances and whether they are switched on. The technology could someday turn on lights when a person enters a room, track a player's motion in an interactive video game or monitor a child's television use. Yang Zhang, a computer science doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University helped to create the concept.

这种智能墙能感应到人类的触碰，追踪近距离的手势。它还能探测到家电的位置以及家电是否启动。未来某一天，这项技术能在有人走进房间时打开灯，并在交互式视频游戏中追踪玩家的动作或监控儿童的电视使用情况。卡内基梅隆大学的计算机科学博士生Yang Zhang帮助研发了这一概念。

To create the high-tech surface, Zhang and his colleagues applied painter's tape in a lattice pattern to a 12-by-eight-foot wall, then coated it with commercially available conductive nickel paint. Removing the tape left a pattern of diamond-shaped electrodes, which the researchers connected using a grid of thin copper tape strips. They affixed a vinyl sticker in the middle of each diamond to insulate the electrodes from one another. Finally, they wired the strips to a custom-built circuit board and covered the wall with standard latex paint. The entire project took four hours and cost less than $200.

为了创造出这种高科技的墙面，Zhang和同事在一面12英尺X8英尺的墙上用油漆匠的胶带贴出网格图案，然后将商用导电漆料涂在上面。去掉胶带后，墙面上会留下一个个菱形图案的电极，随后研究人员会用网状薄铜箔胶带将电极连接起来。他们在每个菱形电极中间贴上乙烯基贴纸，使电极彼此隔离。最后，他们用金属丝将铜箔胶带和一块定制电路板连接起来，并在墙面涂上标准的乳胶涂料。整个工程耗时四个小时，花费不到200美元。

Zhang and his colleagues at Disney Research presented the Wall at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Montreal.

Zhang和他在迪士尼研究所的同事在蒙特利尔举行的CHI计算系统中的人类因素会议上展示了这面墙。

In tracking a touch or gesture, the wall functions similarly to a smartphone screen. The circuit board prompts the electrodes to emit an electric field; when a person's body intercepts this field, it triggers a measurable change in current at the nearby electrodes.

在追踪触碰或手势方面，这面墙的作用类似于智能手机屏幕。电路板促使电极释放电场；当人体介入这个电场时，会触发附近电极产生可测量的电流变化。

In the wall's appliance-detection mode, the power is turned off, and the electrodes act as an antenna to passively pick up electromagnetic waves emitted by nearby devices. The researchers detected iPads up to 6.5 feet away from of the wall; fans and floor lamps could be sensed from about 10 feet.

在这面墙的“家电探测模式”中，电源被切断，电极会像天线那样，被动地接收附近设备发出的电磁波。研究人员探测到了距离墙面6.5英尺的iPads；而距离墙面约10英尺的电扇和落地灯也可以被感应到。