smart floors

Engineers at MIT’s CSAIL have developed a smart carpet that can accurately estimate a person’s movements or body pose without needing cameras. The system could be useful for exercise feedback, monitoring falls, or tracking for VR and gaming.

Bird St in London has undergone something of a transformation recently, going from an underused offshoot to the "world's first Smart Street." Designed to showcase the High Street of the future, it merges pollution-busting and sustainable technology with a traffic-free shopping and dining experience.

UK tech firm Pavegen has been harvesting pedestrian power with floor tiles that convert the kinetic energy of footsteps into electricity since 2009. Today, the firm has launched a new version of the tiles and, in addition to being more efficient, they are able to capture footfall data.

Scientists in Germany are developing high-resolution pressure-sensitive floors to track people and furniture in rooms.