As large and as adamant as the Maker movement may be , its homebrew-tech philosophy is still relatively inaccessible to most people. What the heck can you do with a Raspberry Pi if you don’t know how to solder or code? Nothing. There’s a great divide between things built by regular folks and things built by makers–a divide that’s not going to simply disappear unless technology becomes easier to understand.

SensorTape (PDF), by Artem Dementyev, Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao, and Joe Paradiso from MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group, is an attempt to bridge this gap. It’s essentially a roll of circuits that you can cut, reattach, and affix to various surfaces. And with no extra code required, it’s a completely self-aware sensor network, able to feel itself bend and see light pass by.

“For me, it was interesting to make this kind of complicated sensing network into something like a craft material that’s easy to use and manipulate, so anyone can a manipulate a complicated network as simply as tape,” Dementyev says. “It’s for artists and designers, not just engineers.”

The magic making SensorTape possible isn’t all that hard to understand. It’s just a repeating pattern of electronics printed on a flexible film–something akin to lining up a bunch of iPhones end-to-end on a table. The secret is that each node knows how to talk to its neighbor, and so in whispering along the chain, the nodes can assemble all of their information into an accurate, real-time 3-D model of their own assumed shape. The lab has placed SensorTape on the back of a shirt to track the position of someone’s spine, but it’s a system so accurate that Dementyev believes it could be used for Hollywood-level motion capture, too. Rather than using suits tracked by positional balls, the technology inside SensorTape could pin on someone’s limbs and self-track.

SensorTape is like lining up a bunch of iPhones end-to-end on a table.

Of course, it’s not built as much for one use case as it is for any use case. SensorTape wrapped around your door frame might watch as you walk through and turn on your lights for you. SensorTape applied to your couch might track your posture and be able to pause your DVR when you slouch. It’s the sort of open, do-anything-sensor philosophy reminiscent of Twine, but built into the domestic-friendly UX of good old tape.

That UX includes clear black lines that indicate where it’s safe to cut and break the circuits. Using normal scissors, you can cut in a straight line or at a diagonal angle, which is important, as the diagonal edges allow you to reassemble the film into 2-D shapes like you would a picture frame. (Splicing these bits of film requires a fancy type of conductive 3M tape, or you can re-solder the connections manually.)