Problem 

Staircases are the healthiest way to get from one floor to another, yet unless the elevator is hidden from view, people seem to use elevators and escalators more.

Solution 

The Interactive Stairs create a more interesting and engaging space so that people will be more inclined to use them instead of the elevator.

Detailed Solution 

Using force sensors and top down projection, we have created a system that can be used to make stairs and floors more interactive by projecting different objects onto the space depending on how much force is put onto a certain area.

Further Elaboration 

Our final product is an array of Do-It-Yourself pressure sensors that can measure how much force is placed on them as someone takes a step. This array is placed on the floor for demonstration purposes, but it was intended to be placed on stairs to detect people’s steps as they walk up the stairs. Each of the sensors is connected to an Arduino which is controlled by a computer using Processing that it hooked up to a projector. As people take steps, an animation of a flower is projected from the ceiling down to the floor where the person is standing. While working on this project, we ran into many problems related to the code for the project and the pressure sensors. The code used an abundance of flower animations that were high resolution, causing the program to freeze while running the code after making one animation. This problem lead us to spend multiple days debugging the code to solve the problem, and not working on the rest of it. The sensors were a big problem for us as well. We spent two days just trying to get one working one when there were no problems with the ones we had made, just with the circuit we were using to test the sensors. Because of this we were not able to create the amount of sensors needed to cover the stairs, and we spent most of our last work day just hooking them up on the floor.