By Mark Brown, Wired UK
Disney researchers have come up with a system called Botanicus Interactus that can turn a typical household plant into a touch-sensitive computer peripheral.
A single wire is placed into the soil, and the plant is then transformed into an interactive toy. Now it can detect if and where a plant has been touched, or even if someone just gets near the plant.
The system is built upon capacitive touch sensing – the principle used on touchscreens in smartphones and tablets – but instead of sensing electrical signals at a single frequency, it monitors capacitive signals across a broad range of frequencies. It's called Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing.
This means the computer can detect not only if the plant is being touched, but it can also estimate where and how it's been touched. Botanicus Interactus uses machine-learning algorithms to figure out the connection between a change in a certain frequency, and a touch in a particular location.
So, what can you actually do with a touch-sensitive peace lily? Well, you could turn it into a musical instrument where each leaf plays a different note. Or, if you had a sugar cane-like part, squeezing each segment of the cane could open a different page on a calendar.
"Computing is rapidly fusing with our dwelling places and, thanks to touchpads and Microsoft Kinect, interaction with computers is increasingly tactile and gestural," explained Ivan Poupyrev, senior research scientist at Disney Research. "Still, this interaction is limited to computing devices. We wondered – what if a broad variety of everyday objects around us could interact with us?"
The team will demonstrate an interactive garden of touch-sensitive plants at the Siggraph Emerging Technology expo, which started Monday.