Finnish engineering company Kone is outfitting an elevator with walls made from a thin, flexible, illuminating material that provides the car’s artificial light while also functioning as an information display board and a giant interactive touch screen.

The interactive media surface panel deploys LEDs, embedding the single-point light source within a flexible material.

The project is part of the EU’s Horizon-backed InScope consortium, which besides Kone includes Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) among other industrial companies, plus research institutes from five countries.

Funded by the EU, the InSCOPE project provides an open-access pilot line service that promotes innovation in printed electronics. For the pilot line’s first showcase, the InSCOPE team successfully integrated sensing, lighting and haptic (touch) feedback functionalities to create an interactive media surface panel for the Kone Corporation. Consisting of a smart LED media grid, the showcase panel is implemented in an elevator car where it performs multiple functions including people guidance, decoration, and advertising.

“We were looking for large scale production using printed electronics solutions, and the InSCOPE project has given us the opportunity to study, share visions and needs based on these technologies,” said Jukka Korpihete, senior lighting design specialist at Kone.

The Kone Corporation plans to implement a total of 18 sq.m. of interactive media surfaces to an elevator car as a final demonstrator of the product.

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