Imagine a door that locks when you pinch the knob. Or a
smartphone that can be silenced by a hand gesture. Or a chair
that adjusts room lighting when you recline into it. A team of
researchers at Disney Research and Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh have come up with a system called Touché, which uses
the same capacitive technology as a smartphone's touchscreen to
imbue everyday objects with body and gesture recognition. Your
smartphone works thanks to capacitive coupling. The screen's
surface is coated with a transparent conductor that carries an
electrical signal, and that signal is redirected when a finger
is touching the screen. The phone monitors the change in signal
and can determine where a touch occurs. This is typically a
binary configuration, as the screen is either being touched or
it isn't. Instead, the team at Disney measures across a wide
range of signal frequencies to derive more information. This
means that each gesture—a tap, a pinch, a grasp, a flat palm—has
a different multi-frequenc