Smart rugs, walls, airships to use LEDs, chips

Read about it here.

<font color="blue">"As a proof-of-concept, Infineon created a small section of 'smart' carpet... [that] incorporates robust encapsulated integrated capacitive sensors that act as touch detectors and LEDs as display elements. A carpet equipped with these chips and with this electronic architecture could thus be used as a motion or fire detector. The more densely the sensor elements are arranged, the more precise the results of measurement. At the same time, the integrated LEDs support use of the high-tech carpet as a control system that can be used in public buildings to mark walking routes and control the flow of visitors or to mark escape routes in an emergency."</font>

I could see where this could make for an interesting movie theatre where the walls and ceilings would be part of the screen. First, Surround Sound, now Surround Light.

I bet they never tried vacuming that carpet... I could imagine a few thousand LEDs in the vacume bag after you run the ol Eureka upright or Oreck XL upright over that rug. And I'd hate to think what would happen if somebody tried to shampoo that carpet. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/icon15.gif

Supposedly, it's waterproof....

Sounds interesting, how about carpets with video displays built into them? In them parks we have videodomes which give you an all round 360 degree view, everywhere except the floor, that is. They use about 20 or 30 videoprojectors to project onto the dome. Now you couldn include the floor in your videodome experience, and experience (visually at any rate) the floor dissappearing and your entire being is surrounded with video images!...could be one step from holodeck technology as depicted in Star Trek!

That sounds feasible, but probably not in a theatre context with a packed audience and lots of seats. Would work better in larger room, with lots of open area and no seats.