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developed in collaboration with architect Joakim Hannerz. It has to be said that Sensacell is not the world's most versatile system. It relies on changes in capacitance to detect presence and location and can therefore pick up conductive objects like the human body, but that's about it. Sensacell returns no load information, offers no way to differentiate between individuals, and certainly isn't designed to establish connections with mobile devices. It's not even necessarily fine-grained enough to distinguish between your transit of a space and the midnight errands of the family cat. And given that its presentation to date has focused on output in the (admittedly quite pretty) form of banks of embedded LEDs, Sensacell seems destined for applications in a relatively narrow swath of high-concept bars, lounges, and retail spaces.

But Sensacell has three big advantages over its predecessors: It's modular, it comes in sizes that conform to the square-foot grid actually used by contractors, and it is commercially available right now. What's more, the luminous cells can be integrated into vertical surfaces, even furniture, and their stream of output data can be jacked into just about any garden-variety PC. The pricing is on the high side, but not absurdly so, and will surely fall in the event of any large-scale production. For all of these reasons, Sensacell is accessible, within reach of the kind of tinkering ubihackers who may be key to the wider spread of everyware.

In addition to flooring, instrumented doorways have also begun to appear. Knowledge of door status can be very useful in context-aware applications—whether an office door is open or closed can imply something about the relative intensity with which the occupant is engaged in a task, while a change in state is generally a marker that a user is transitioning between one activity and another. But door sensors can also be used simply to count how many people enter or leave a given room. (Fire inspectors might want to take note.) California startup InCom's recent pilot program InClass aimed to cut down on teacher administrative time by doing just this, producing a tally of classroom attendance as students wearing RFID-equipped nametags passed beneath a transom-mounted reader.*

* Parents objected to the program on privacy concerns, and the system was withdrawn from operation after less than a month.

If the doorway produces both headcounts and inferences about behavior, and the floor is occasionally called upon to be everything from impact detector to transmission medium, walls have it relatively easy. Most ubiquitous projects to date have treated the wall first and foremost as a large-scale display surface, with its use as a communication hub following from this.

This, of course, conforms to a venerable tradition in science fiction, but such ultraflat, ultrawide screens are now on the verge of practical reality. Motorola's Physical Science Research Laboratory recently presented sections of a prototype carbon nanotube screen 160 cm across diagonally by a single centimeter thick. If either Motorola or its competitors manage to produce nanotube displays at commercial scale, truly wall-spanning displays cannot be far off, although they're still probably years and not months away.

For some interested parties, this may seem like a long time to wait, given the wall-screen's centrality to their visions of the "digital home." In the more elaborate of such schemes, the wall becomes some combination of home theater, videophone, whiteboard, and family scratchpad—a site where downloaded media objects are delivered for consumption, a communication medium in its own right, and the place where other networked devices in the home are managed.

You can already buy appliances ostensibly designed with such distributed control in mind: the first generation of Internet-capable domestic appliances, typified by LG's suite of refrigerator, air conditioner, microwave, and washing machine.

Whatever their merits as appliances, however, they completely fail to capitalize on their nature as