Get working on your cheesy rhymes because there may be a new market for jingle writers soon.
Researchers at the University of Sweden are using conductive ink to make sound-producing paper that responds to touch. The prototypes are billboards made entirely of paper that play music or dialogue depending on where you touch them. Watch the video
The applications are endless – commercial packaging, music sampling in record stores, aides for the blind and visual impaired, interactive books…
Right now this technology exists only for large-scale objects like billboards, but the researchers are scaling it down. A New Scientist Tech article quotes Mikael Gulliksson, lead researcher, as saying,
We are interested in scaling the technology down to produce interactive packaging for products like chocolates.
Yum, chocolate. Maybe next Valentines Day I’ll get a box of Swedish chocolates that can serenade me…
The boards are created in three layers – a base made from sturdy cardboard, a middle layer screen-printed with conductive ink, and a top layer printed with the billboard design.
All of the information is digitally embedded in the paper and the touch sensors and speakers are printed directly on the middle layer. The middle layer is connected to a power supply and some microelectronics which enable the user to play, pause, and rewind the sounds as shown in the video.
I think this is great stuff. I am seriously worried, though, that if this technology becomes common every time my roommate pours food for her cat I’ll have to hear the meow mix.