As residential painters in Toronto, we are constantly researching what is new in the paint market so that we bring the best to our wonderful clients. We have been following the news on some highly innovative smart paints and thought we would share some of the mindblowing news with you.
Hello, Can Anyone Hear Me?
Yes, researchers have become quite sci-fi at Carnegie Mellon University working with Disney Research. A team designed a wall treatment (paint) to interact with sensory hardware and they, in true Disney style, named it Wall++. It provides you with a full-wall trackpad, noting your touch and gestures, calculating your posture and detecting if appliances are working in what location.
The conductive paint creates electrodes in a pattern across the wall and is sealed with a top layer of regular latex paint. The conductive surface connects to a home management system via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or cables.
You could turn on lights with a tap, be notified in another room when the toast has popped up, or recognize gestures for playing video games. The estimated price is USD20 per square metre.
Why consider Wall++? It’s less intrusive than cameras with AI and won’t be hacked for information so privacy levels are higher. The above functions of the product are only a small percentage. Researchers believe humankind benefits can be derived from its use in hospitals, museums, fitness centres, educational institutions, etc.
They are considering the possibility of detecting moisture levels, audio, vibration, harvesting energy, or displaying information. A 2-metre-high wall-display clock would help with getting kids ready for school on time.
Clean Energy Paint
A research team at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Australia, created a new synthetic compound that can be added to paint to harvest energy and produce fuel.
The synthetic molybdenum-sulphide also has a semi-conductor and catalytic action whereby it splits H2O into hydrogen and oxygen. When added to paint, specifically the titanium oxide particles, it absorbs sunlight and generates hydrogen fuel from the sunlight and humidity.
The paint will work as a supplementary power source with solar panels wherever there is sun and the slightest level of moisture in the air.
Chilling Paint
Not a horror movie “chilling”, but cooling down ‒ now that is interesting for our summer months.
SolCold, based in Israel, has developed a double-layered paint coating system that actively reduces indoor thermometer levels by as much as ten degrees celsius! The extra funky feature is that the hotter the sun, the better the result. The outer micro-filter acts first by stopping the sun’s rays. The next action is by the inner layer. When the heat reaches it, it converts the heat into a cooling light.
The exciting news is that when a rooftop is coated with the SolCold product, the air-conditioning energy demand could drop by 60%, which delivers many benefits! The next bit of smile-worth info is that the product has zero carbon emissions. It may sound pricey at an estimated fifty US dollars per square metre, but the energy and environmental savings easily repay that over the product’s ten to fifteen-year lifespan.
We hope you have said at least one wow to the above fascinating paint developments. We can’t wait for them to become mainstream. Keep tuned for more exciting news.
Call our expert residential painters in Toronto today for your interior or exterior painting projects!