The floor has ears: the school carpet that generates energy and tracks pupils’ every move
▻http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/sep/06/school-carpet-energy-tracks-pupils
“The idea is about much more than just energy creation,” says the designer, explaining that each tile is fitted with a wifi transmitter, to beam information about its energy generation and location back to a central computer. “I can see exactly what each part of the floor is doing at any one time, all from my phone,” he says. “And that data is gold.”
Kemball-Cook clearly has his eyes on more than saving a school’s energy bills. “It could have really powerful applications in retail,” he says. “You could know exactly where the hotspots were on your shop floor, where people were shopping at what time of day. How people behave and move is the heartbeat of the high street.”
He says it could also be useful in entertainment spaces – monitoring how people move around casinos – as well as for fire safety, tracking where people are in a building, in real time. “Way-finding, security lighting, controlling temperatures in buildings – in each case, monitoring from the floor tiles means you can measure with pin-point accuracy.”