MIT Researchers Have Developed User Interfaces and Displays That Can Be Spray Painted Onto Surfaces

Creating user interfaces on a large scale is usually a labor intensive undertaking. It’s one thing to place a few buttons or a touchscreen on PCB, but it’s quite another to turn an entire wall into a user interface. It is possible to use some sort of camera-based tracking system, but that is expensive and cumbersome. Until now, the most practical option has been to cut out large capacitive touch pads. Unfortunately, those don’t easily conform to irregular services. That’s why a team of researchers have come up wth a system for spray painting user interfaces and even simple displays.

SprayableTech was developed by a team at MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). The interfaces can be applied using a conventional air brush, meaning you won’t need any expensive specialized tools. The functionality comes from the paint itself, which is embedded with “functional inks.” Those inks give the paint useful electronic properties. For example, you might spray a conductive paint and then switch over to a dielectric paint. By utilizing these special paints, you can create simple sensors on a very large scale. You can even take that idea and run with it to make simple illuminated displays.

Using this technology is similar to any other kind of spray painting. The easiest and quickest method would be to do some free hand spray painting, which is completely suitable for making a simple capacitive touch pad. Another option is to design your circuits in software and then cut out stencils. That’s useful if you want something more complex, such as a capacitive touch slider with multiple segments. You can also make an illuminated display by using stencils to carefully apply multiple layers, one of which is an electroluminescent phosphor layer. Finally, you can use a projected image to gain the benefits of both methods. The paint can be applied to a wall or something more unusual like a couch. All you need to monitor the sensors is a regular ol’ development board, like an Arduino Uno.