I was wanting to make a display based on electrostrictie gels. You have a lot of blobs of gel dyed cyan, amgenta, and yellow. Left alone, they are big, and absorb light. Stick on a voltage, they shrink to a little dot, and most of the light gets past.

Now most of the gels and the loiquid they are in are about the same refractive index, so the display would hardly diffuse at all. If you stuck a metallic back to the display, then yellow would appear gold, pink would appear copper, and so on. Fun, but a bit limited.

However, suppose you could switch between diffuse and specular (metallic) reflection. You could do this with a liquid crystal (without polarizer) in front of a mirror back. Or you could have mercury, moving because its surface tension varies with electic potential. Then you could have a reflective colour display that could do matt and metallic colours.
-- Richard K, Dec 20 2002

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're talking about a display that uses ambient light for it's images?
-- phoenix, Dec 20 2002


Who is matt, and why are you so interested in displaying him?
-- notme, Dec 20 2002


This sounds like it might work.
-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Dec 20 2002


sp: subtractive, electrostrictive, magenta, liquid, matte.

Can't you put an ordinary LCD in front of your magic mirror, or is your concern that the LCD elements are too diffusive?
-- egnor, Dec 20 2002


For some reason K makes me proud to have gone to a total geek college.
-- RayfordSteele, Dec 20 2002


How do you get around the contrast problems? I like the idea though, a truly full colour display where you can leave one corner mirrored to see what's going on behind you.
-- scubadooper, Sep 02 2003



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