Impossible Objects #25: Wall-sized light switches
Do you believe this one? A French design company, Quarks Design, has apparently created a special paint that can be used to control appliances.
Coolest Gadgets reports the “Quarks has created a tactile ‘switch’, a fusion of paint and embedded electronic mechanisms that enable a wall to act as an electronic switch”.
It quotes the APCI (Agency for the Promotion of Industrial Creation) as follows:
The principle here is composed of paint and an electronic mechanism. Once the ON/OFF paint has been applied to the wall, a simple touch detects the contact desired by the user to control an electrical appliance. This “switch” is no longer positioned at an exact location only a few square centimetres in size but on the entire surface of the wall. The paint can be applied with a roller or a brush, on any background (plaster, wood, concrete, plastic, etc.). It may be covered in a coat of paint the colour you want, or wallpaper, without losing effectiveness. ON/OFF may be combined with a lamp, an alarm, roller blinds or any electrically-controlled appliances. You can add another function to the unit such as a dimmer, timer or plug.
What this means is that a switch can cover a large surface, and the traditional ‘mechanism’ disappears because “the contact area location and dimension can be chosen easily, whether a strip, a whole wall or an isolated area”.
Previous Impossible Objects we’ve covered:
- the Liquid table
- the Liquid lamp
- the foetal bed
the wall stairs
the piano stairs
the shattering door
the wooden mirror
the Wingdings keyboard
the door lock maze
the dark lamp the global chess board the curved keyboard the implausible plug
the infinite tap
the simplified calculator
the electric hammer
the signature coffee pot