no more bulky boxes to get your new tv home all you need to do is pick up a can of liquid crystal paint. the crystal would dry clear on the surface of a wall and all you would do is plug in a set of wires that would control the electrical imput to the layer of liquid crystal.
-- 10clock, Apr 20 2005

Crystal Blackboard http://msn-cnet.com...5512225.html?tag=nl
Just how 3-D does TV have to be? [reensure, Apr 22 2005]

found it! http://www.kijk.nl/artikel.jsp?art=8497
It's in dutch, sorry. [zeno, Apr 23 2005]

"'Techno-paint' can change colour" http://www.ananova....enu=news.technology
Mighty slim on details [half, Apr 23 2005]

LCD paint licked: Walls and curtains could sport liquid-crystal digital displays. http://www.prisma-t.../latestnews_lcd.htm
Another article. Found by searching for "Dirk Broer" referenced in the first article. Doesn't seem to have been much activity on this since 2002. [half, Apr 23 2005]

More info on LCD paint technology http://www.stereomi...BD6C1256CDE0023123B
See the links contained therein. Philips seems to own the technology. [half, Apr 23 2005]

Another link for [Basepair] http://www.research...y/ov_paintdisp.html
Straight from the source [zeno, Apr 27 2005]

This reminds me of my initial post to the 'bakery. It consisted of a can of smart metal you dumped in your car engine, which then sought out worn places and repaired them.

That idea and this idea are not impossible, but they are so far beyond what we can currently do that they may as well be. They are also outside the scope of this website.......check out the help file on the left under META.

Try again, you'll have fun once you get the hang of it.
-- normzone, Apr 20 2005


It wouldn't quite work like expected.

You'd have one big LCD cell. To make an LCD tv, you need millions of small LCD cells, and the ability to direct a current to each one individually. That way you can change each individual cell's color to form a picture. Your way would get a large blob.

Sorry.

What normzone said.
-- DesertFox, Apr 20 2005


+ for "imput". But seriously - don't get discouraged, 10 oclock. Keep them coming. I can think of good applications of this even if it were one big LCD cell. For example - painting on a window to allow darkening of window.
-- bungston, Apr 20 2005


Well, we've yet to hear from the technocrats, so I don't know if it would work that way.

But if it does, I've always wanted on/off tinted windows for my truck.
-- normzone, Apr 20 2005


Sorry, this is defenitely baked allready. Too tired now to search for link. Goodnight!
-- zeno, Apr 22 2005


What do you mean "it's baked?!" In your dreams, perhaps.

Something that can be painted on, in essence, randomly distributed emissive, or imaging, elements, requires some sort of automatic organization to the level that they can identify themselves individually--a unique address--after they have organized. This is all in addition to the ability to image and to somehow conduct power to the imaging elements.

Since they are distributed willy-nilly, these autonomous particles will need to organize such that imagers that are occluded from the viewer by other imagers must excuse themselves from operation, a task that requires the knowledge of the location of their neighbors in 3D space (albeit with a very shallow Z depth) as well as an understanding of in which direction along Z the viewers eyeballs reside.

Short of some vaporous nanotechnology ideal, this is an extremely tall order.
-- bristolz, Apr 22 2005


Perhaps "defenitely" means something radically different from "definitely".
-- waugsqueke, Apr 22 2005


Shirley, LCD displays need electrodes on the front and back planes, and a polarizing layer? And is a liqud crystal still a liquid crystal when it "dries clear on the surface"?
-- Basepair, Apr 22 2005


[bristolz], I love it when you talk like that.
-- normzone, Apr 23 2005


No really, Philips did the research last year and develloped a paint-on-your-wall tv screen. I saw a documentary-thingy on tv. Paint a large square on your wall and plug it in with a small plug directly attached to the painted wall. Not that it is good enough to sell it in your local store, but baked in priciple. So Philips had the idea some time ago and created a working prototype. That makes it baked in my book.
-- zeno, Apr 23 2005


Find a citation for it, please. I must see this.
-- bristolz, Apr 23 2005


There it is, [bristolz], see link. In dutch, but I think you'll manage to get the gist of it. (paint=verf)
-- zeno, Apr 23 2005


yeah i just did a search.. its baked alright.. lame but at the same time very cool
-- 10clock, Apr 23 2005


May be the wall is prepared by attaching microcircuits to it before it is painted with Liquid Crystal.

Yes, even after it is dry, it is Liquid. (Encapsulated in small cells, more likely.)
-- neelandan, Apr 23 2005


"They coat a glass or plastic base with a thin layer of the LCD paint and mask out squares so that a blast of ultraviolet forms a grid of walls. When they remove the mask, a second exposure - at a wavelength that does not penetrate the whole liquid layer - seals over the boxes with a lid.

Standard LCDs, which are divided up into pixels, turn dark when a voltage crosses between electrodes on the two glass plates. The new displays instead pass voltage between two points on the same plate. Colour LCDs fit each pixel with red, green and blue colour filters."

From my second link.

There was apparently an article in "Nature" that is now only available to subscribers.
-- half, Apr 23 2005


The article in my third link contains links to the details that [bristolz] seeks. (clearly supports her position, not surprisingly)
-- half, Apr 23 2005


"All you need to do is pick up a can of liquid crystal paint."

Oh, and a precision lithography system to organize the elements.
-- bristolz, Apr 23 2005


Details, details...
-- half, Apr 23 2005


[zeno] - your Dutch link seemed (from the pictures at least) to be showing flexible LCD displays, but nothing like the "painted plug-and-play wall" you describe. I found the word "verf" (paint, you say?), but the context was lost on me. Is there a Dutchman in the house?
-- Basepair, Apr 23 2005


The picture is misleading, it is a small bit painted and working. Hang on I'll do a synopsis.
-- zeno, Apr 24 2005


Philips won the Descartes prize for innovative science. They researched pled (a halfconducting polymere that gives of light) for twelve years and managed to make a paint out of it. The upshot of it is that you can paint a section of your wall, attach a plug right on the paint and feed it with your video tranceiver. It can be used on your wall without further ado or on any surface you choose.
-- zeno, Apr 24 2005


That's a synopsis of the Dutch version of the technology described in the linked English language articles? Considering that the articles I linked refer to Dutch scientists, I assumed it was the same thing.

So, you slap paint on the wall and then you just attach a video signal anyplace on this wall of paint and it all sorts itself out in to a picture? Wow, how fantasytic is that?!
-- half, Apr 24 2005


[zeno] Thanks for the synopsis. However, I'm pretty sure that the bit following "upshot" is either wild-eyed optmism on the part of the Dutch, or some misunderstanding on the part of the reporter. Are there any pictures of this thing actually upshooting?
-- Basepair, Apr 24 2005


From my link:

\\Dat betekent dat op ieder oppervlak een beeldscherm kan worden aangebracht, door het simpelweg te beschilderen en aan te sluiten op een pc. \\ Translates as: This means that on any surface a vieuwscreen can be applied by simply painting it and hooking it up to a pc.

The article is from a scientific magazine (kijk) for children. It is a serious magazine that explains about science breakthroughs and science history in a way that kids can understand it. Many adults that don't understand the scientific lingo read this magazine instead.
-- zeno, Apr 24 2005


use alta vista babel fish to translate the page
-- 10clock, Apr 24 2005


[Zeno] - I don't dispute what it says, just that there is some misunderstanding or over-exuberance on the part of the reporter. However, I'll eat my words if anyone can show me an example of someone painting this stuff onto an ordinary surface and getting an image, or even explain how such a system could work. It'd be nice, though...
-- Basepair, Apr 24 2005


I found a couple of links similar to what [half] linked to (1 being developed in Germany & 1 being developed at Case Western)
None of those links explain how the polymer's light emmission is activated in a controlled manner to produce images.
A LRT (laser ray tube) hung from ceiling?
-- Zimmy, Apr 24 2005


[Basepair], I've added another link, from the Philips page. This should tell you all you want to know.

From the link: \\The displays can be made on a wide variety of substrates, including plastic, enabling for example large, paintable displays on walls or flexible displays integrated in clothing.\\

I must say that in my earlier anno's I oversimplified things a bit. It is not so that you can buy a can of paint at your local hardware store and paint your wall and hey presto!: a big tv! But researchers at philips are now able to paint large surfaces and display moving images on them.

I was surpised at your disbelief after you saw the link from Kijk magazine. But you are not dutch, so you could not know the integrity of said magazine, nor its "trustworthyness". Dutch people say: if it's in kijk it must be true. I hope I have satisfied your curiosity. Do you now agree to the bakedness of this idea?
-- zeno, Apr 27 2005


Painting the wall is the trivial step. From the articles, it sounds like it'd be cheaper, less complex, and easier to paint the wall white, and then project the image from an LCD projector.

How you can control each pixel is the "magic" (or, the complexity that must be handled some other way than the paint).
-- sophocles, Apr 27 2005


[zeno] The links do not describe a 'paint on display'. What they describe is impressive, but it is only a means of creating the LCD elements by painting them **over the substrate**, and the substrate still has to contain the control grid.

In other words, this technology is a clever way of creating the LCD layer of the display, but you still need the control layers. It will indeed enable you to make more versatile displays (including wallpaper- type screens), but if you paint this stuff on your wall, you will simply wind up with a painted wall.
-- Basepair, Apr 28 2005



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