Mike Rohde articulated an idea that I’ve had kicking around in my head for years: electronic house paint.
What if you could develop a house paint with color pigmentation that could be shifted simply by pressing a button on an electronic device? The idea being that your house paint would be a clear coat with tiny electronically-changeable pigments floating around in the paint.
Given the direction that flexible LCD screens are going, it probably won’t be too long before some bright scientist or engineer figures out how to spray a liquid crystal display onto a surface. The hard part is getting what starts out as a soup of random microelectronic components to align themselves properly as the “paint” dries. You could possibly run a current through the paint to get everything aligned properly.
This is the kind of job that is tailor-made for a mature nanotechnology. If all the elements in the paint could simply move themselves into the correct positions, you wouldn’t even need to do anything special while the paint is drying. Assuming that making the nanomachines in the paint is feasible, the other problem to overcome is in software. You’d need a display driver that can cope with an irregularly-shaped surface, composed of near-randomly distributed pixels. The nanomachines, now embedded in the dried surface, could help out a little here by sending diagnostic signals back to a controlling computer, which could then organically assemble code that can control the new display. Essentially, the controller would grow its own driver, based on feedback from the nanocircuitry in the paint.
The fun part about this idea is that it’s not limited to houses or cars, as described in Mike’s article. I’d love to see this embedded in clothing, or even in the first few layers of skin. Tattoos that you can change on a whim — or even animate — would be an awful lot of fun.
