Slashdot Mirror
Paintable LCDs
frambooz writes "Nature Magazine has an article about a team from the Eindhoven University of Technology and Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, who discovered a way to create 1 layer paintable LCD-screens. It can be used on glass and plastic already, and fabric in the near future. 'Homes of the future could change their wallpaper from cream to cornflower blue at the touch of a button, says Dirk Broer. His team has developed paint-on liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that offer the technology. (...) The technique could create giant TV screens, digital billboards and walls that change colour. Slim, plastic LCDs sewn into fabric could display e-mail or text messages on your sleeve.' Which leads to another problem: with an LCD-suit, where would you put which app?" There's also an AP article.
LCD paint licked
Walls and curtains could sport liquid-crystal digital displays.
2 May 2002
HELEN PEARSON
One layer LCDs could lead to smaller, cheaper, lighter gadgets.
© R. Penterman et al.
Homes of the future could change their wallpaper from cream to cornflower blue at the touch of a button, says Dirk Broer. His team has developed paint-on liquid crystal displays (LCDs) that offer the technology.
Liquid crystals are peculiar liquids: their molecules spontaneously line up, rather than being randomly orientated as in a normal liquid. Passing a voltage across the molecules switches their alignment, blocking the transmission of light so a display changes from light to dark.
Current LCDs on digital watches, mobile phones and laptops sandwich the crystal between heavy glass plates. The complicated production process is time-consuming, expensive and restricts the size of screens to just 1 metre square.
Broer and his colleagues have devised a new open-sandwich technique that instead deposits a layer of liquid crystal onto a single underlying sheet. Working at Eindhoven University of Technology and Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands, Broer's team has already produced prototypes on glass and plastic; fabric could be next.
The technique could create giant TV screens, digital billboards and walls that change colour. Slim, plastic LCDs sewn into fabric could display e-mail or text messages on your sleeve. "It depends what future societies want," says Broer.
The technique should feed people's thirst for smaller, cheaper gadgets. Conventional glass LCDs now make up an increasing part of a laptop's weight - plastic versions could change that, says Peter Raynes, who studies LCD technology at the University of Oxford, UK.
Crystal glazing
Broer's team made the LCD paint by mixing liquid crystal with molecules that link together into a rigid polymer when exposed to ultraviolet. In a two-stage process they effectively build tiny boxes holding the liquid1.
Don't expect to buy a watch featuring one of the new displays in the next six months
Peter Raynes, University of Oxford, UK
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.
"Don't expect to buy a watch featuring one of the new displays in the next six months," warns Raynes, however. He cautions that the technique needs work: compared with glass, the thin outer layer may be more easily penetrated by oxygen or water that degrade the crystal.
References
# Penterman, R. et al. Single-substrate liquid-crystal displays by photo-enforced stratification. Nature, 417, 55 - 58, (2002).
Slashdot, come for the goatse, stay for the trolls.
IT WILL HAPPEN ONE DAY!
_________________________________________________
I'm looking forward to painting cars with this...then EVERYONE can have flames on their SUV.
The web browser, conveniently opened to you-know-where, on the back part of your pants...
I don't imagine it would be a good idea to have one of these paint on screens in a home where small children are present. Kids tend to make a mess out of traditional monitors, but ones that cover an entire wall? Thats an accident waiting to happen.
"Which leads to another problem: with an LCD-suit, where would you put which app?"
I'm a little afraid for user input if i'd put my apps in wrong places...
...with an LCD-suit, where would you put which app?
Well, Windows XP could go on my wife's butt. They're both unnecessarily big and bloated, and despite what some people say, they can be trimmed down with some work.
daed si luap
Slim, plastic LCDs sewn into fabric could display e-mail or text messages on your sleeve.' Which leads to another problem: with an LCD-suit, where would you put which app?"
Lets see...
Front of pants, PKUnZip
Back of pants, DownloadAccelerator
options are endless....
sig--we don't need no goddamn sig
...to play doom on my t-shirt!
...type a word document on my pants
...calculate budgets on my boxer shorts (and hand them to the CEO saying they have been used well)
no sig error.
the mind shudders...
I'd of course run linux across my shoulders, chest and back. Like a tattoo that I want people to see.
Guess I'd run Windows across my ass.
with an LCD-suit, where would you put which app?
[Tycho voice]
On my wang. Everything... on... my... wang.
[/Tycho voice]
--saint
You could use this stuff on fabric along with tiny video cameras to create predator-style invisibility.
Roadkill is yummy.
The article cunningly doesn't mention how much a fair amount (say - a bucket :) - enough to paint a wall with) would cost. If it's $50 for a square metre's worth of LCD, then fine; if it's £500, it's practically useless.
I do see interesting applications for this though - like interating an LCD into your sleeve or backpack. We'll see in 6 months if this is all it's cracked up to be :)
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
this has got to be one of the coolest technologies to come along recently. Imagine carrying a 'roll up' monitor along with your laptop instead of the traditional screen. T-shirts in ten years: connect by firewire to your computer and set a .jpeg file as your 'background'
Thank you Dave Raggett
Imagine walking down a supermarket lane with your cart, with all of the cans and boxes waving at you, with their tiny voices in chorus saying "Buy Me!", "Don't listen to that brand, Buy me instead!".
just the pressure from the kids would be enough to be insane. "Can we get this one mom?"
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
A new application for the "paintable LCD" is to make it the new Body Paint.
Yes, paint your whole body with that stuffs, turn on the switch, and turn off the lights, and you got a walking, dancing, talking advertising board !
What a great boom for the ad industry, donjatink?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
They can develop an organic light emitting lcd that is flexible, yet my GBA still has no backlight!!
Thank God for the afterburner (www.tritonlabs.com).
Sound waves should be free!
An LCD outfit would be a hit at raves and clubs. Your gear would become the ultimate glowstick. Set your clothes to change colour with the beat of the music and set up some cool visulizations and your away.
Ho, hum, another totally useless invention.
[1] Why do so many of the self-professed "science geeks" around here rely on Slashdot for science news rather than reading what real scientists have to say directly in magazines like Nature and Science?
AFAI percieve it, this technology will not be used for "wearing" apps (really...apart from your sleeves, which other part of cloth are you prepared to look at repeatedly bending your neck or pulling up the cloth?)
Instead, it can be used in various scientific/space experiments (ya...think of the possibilities....this is an excellent weight reduction appliance where we need to transfer quick information, instead of screens)
I would probably take a life-size image from a project from a few years ago, where they turned a corpse into plastic, and photographed very thin slices of it. Just display such a slice on your LCD-suit, and totally gross people out.
Might there be a use for this as a camouflage tool? Have suits made of the stuff with various settings to blend into whatever backround is chosen.
What about advertising: The new Nike tracksuit, sans sown on logo, but instead with scrolling LCD patch on arm with scrolling Nike advertisements (stores may even provide a discount - hell, you're a walking billboard!). Staff Uniforms at Burger King/K-Mart/etc with the latest specials/reductions displayed and constantly updated - how hard would it be to display your own images though, I wonder?
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
If the front of the suit would display stuff behind you and so on, wouldn't this make you partially invisible for others?
Now, it would be really cool if this stuff got cheap and bio-friendly. Meaning you could paint your entire body in it. Imagine being a chameleon! You could turn red when your mad. You could be African American today and Albino tomorrow. You could radiate shimmering rainbow colors at will. The next step would be to interface these LCD's with your brain, so you wouldn't have to mess with a controller device. Alas, too good to be true.
Hacking the Network
Great, now I'm going to have nightmares about being chased down supermarket aisles by a box of Cherrios shrieking "Buyyyy Meeeee!"
.. beowulf cluster, eeeuh, no, I mean, a suit of this stuff with the colour being dynamically altered to match the surroundings. You'd be practically invisible!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
the Karma Whore
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
At the very least, you could have a suit that would blend into the background or color scheme for a theatre of conflict.
;)
Modify a guille suit to have a coat of color changing needles and a soldier could be undetectable - even at very close distances.
Now the real trick - how to have the suit be aware of its surroundings and blend into them. Octopi and other animals seem to have mastered this trick - how hard could it be?
"First you get the Linux, then you get the power, THEN you get the women"
I would put small cameras in front and behind me which displayed their images on the opposite side of the suite.
:-) are dense enough to reflect light realistically then perhaps that isn't a problem for some applicaitons: the invisibility application, however, presents a problem.
It may not be invisibility but it's damned close.
The problem I see is: what about backlighting? LCD required backlighting to work doesn't it? If the colors (colours for you brits
My $0.02 will always be worth more than your â0.02, so
Just think, they could do the Teletubby show live!
Slim, plastic LCDs sewn into fabric could display e-mail or text messages on your sleeve.' Yeah, just what I've always wanted... now those dumb t-shirts that advertise for everything will be animated... Seriously, will this technology end up being better and brighter than organic LEDs? Just a thought... Justin
you could go completely nude and paint clothes on yourself. Or you could wear clothes and make them look like your nude.
Just a general rule, I would recommend not placing any M$ product near your anus.
Acknowledgements to Larry Niven for coming up with this idea ("It's a Bulova Dali") in one of his tales of Known Space.
I *want* a Panther Modern suit...
Now imagine a paint-on wall-size screen.
Imagine you had the money to pay for the research into rapid deployment of high-tech command centers to remote locations. Get the picture?
Who needs CRTs when you have tent walls.
The only hard part of LCDs these days is getting the line resolution and registration down to 1/100 of an inch. Its not the material. If you don't need wires 1/200th of an inch thin every 1/100th of an inch, it a LOT easier and cheaper.
If you can weave the support and control lines into cloth and slather on the LCD goo in a controlled thickness, seal it all in clear, weather-proof plastic with good UV reactant properties, its gets a lot cheaper.
The only hard parts are seperating pixels (weave in regularly spaced thick insulating/isolating thread,) and getting the signal to the LCD material (which requires regularly-spaced "fuzzy" knots in the metalic "signal carrier" thread.
The technology has been around for a while.
Anybody remember pictures of women slipping magnetic doughnuts onto wires and threading a third wire into 'em to make "core" memory?
These are refinements and cost-cutting.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Guess I'll have to take the dart board down or else one stray may chnage the color of everything, then shatter my wall.
There are military contractor already on this one, but they're using flat panels. A camera could capture the image behind you and project that image on the front part of your 'suit'. Doesn't need to be a sharp, perfectly aligned image either. Just get the color and intensity right. The US Army already wants this one...--> http://www.aro.army.mil/phys/Nanoscience/sec4nano. htm
Holy buh-jeezus! Did anyone else read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury?
It was scary enough when they brought out those flat-panel plasma screens (not that I'm complaining), but now that you could paint all 4 walls w/ television screens...
This combined with the advent of Aibo (remeber the mechanical dog in the firehouse?), seems to me Bradbury was dead on.
Slim, plastic LCDs sewn into fabric could display e-mail or text messages on your sleeve.'
:(
Just great, the next MS email virus is going to spam my shirt sleeve with "--> IDIOT HERE -->" text to let everyone know I'm not using a secure email client
...right on my ass.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
and it gets worse.
Since this stuff can be embedded into fabric, obviously you can have T-shirts, etc. Obviously, You know someone will add wireless capability for continous updates, etc.
The free car program where you get a free car because it has Advertising on it can now have cars that are updated monthly.
The visual equivalent of pop-up ads everywhere, as you drive or walk down the street.
Then add in your occasional prankster. Your room mate configures the back of your jacket to display pr0n as you walk down the street.
And we call this progress. just a simple extrapolation of the spammer mentality to the use of the new media forms
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
i can see the size of offices shrininking even more as they just paint the cubilcles with this paint and hook your net pc up to it, then take away your desk. well... could be the start of the paperless office, or not
Burt "Out of my mind back in 5 minutes"
Embed this into skin, you could have targeted ads on your forehead. Your coworker needs a shower; your forehead displays 'Speedstick. By Mennen.'
C'mon Madison Ave! This is needed!
...to install blackbox on my pants.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
I've always wanted a video wall at home. That way I'm really using the available "real estate" to it's maximum capability. It would be great to have video on my cubicle walls at work. No monitor... a little to my right is my e-mail, touch the app window in front of me to bring my word processor into focus. It would be cool to have touch-support on video walls at work, along with a keyboard. Drag documents around... no more white board with smelly markers, just open a blank "window" and draw, no scanning needed to save it... have the video phone display to my left... drag a doc onto the other person's face to let them see it...
/. for building my dreams while I still have to suffer in this world! ;-)
Damn, now I'm just staring at my boring cube walls and monitor for the rest of the day. Thanks
Developers: We can use your help.
will your brand sparkly wallpaper just turn black?
What about ebooks? Use this thing to create a normal looking book. And don't forget to add some touch-screens. At least kids would love this..
I think the only practical application for this could eliminate the back side glass, but the front side glass would have to remain. This would obviously make clothing not an option. Wallpaper wouldn't really work either. Perhaps just one large wall, but then how big a sheet of glass/plexi is possible?
My dream is to have 1 large wall in my living room function as my TV and computer desktop. I can picture a super large desktop, perhaps 4000x3000, with tons of apps up and running spanning the wall in front of me! Browser over there, spreadsheet up there, mp3 player down there, and Quake3 directly in front. I guess it would kinda be like Marty's future house from Back to the Future 2.
(Yeah its already possible with LCD projectors, but an LCD wall is much cooler!)
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
What if you could hack somebody's suit. You could way beyond puting a "Kick Me" sign on their back, you could make it display the image of a naked body, sorta making them look like they are naked at first glance (just wait till they stand up to give their speach first hehehe) or put a scrolling marquee on their back saying anything you want. Put "Kiss it" on their butt. You could put a woman's bra size on boobs, or target circles, or "Silicon inside" or "They ARE real, and they're spectacular"
Oh the endless possibilities.
I'm sure they are working on something for this, but most LCDs do not primarily work by reflection, they work by filtering out the parts of white light that you don't want in the image. So, how do you backlight cloth? or a little rollup screen?
Has anyone has seen the iPaq without the backlight on (which is by far the best non-backlit LCD I've seen)? It is still unusable in non-office lighting conditions. And that is a best case scenario.
I had a dream last year that this article loosely relates to.
/. article about some kind of printable display from IBM.)
Not only does some type of display technology become printable, but so do the circuits. (I think I had this dream soon after the
In short, it becomes possible to "print" an entire PDA onto your wrist. Sort of like a tatoo wristwatch. In fact, in the dream, they become so useful that everyone must have one. The printable display can even fashion various barcodes on the display briefly for scanning.
Only problem is that the PDA wears off after about a month and you've got to get another one printed on. They are fairly cheap to re-print each month. About $30 or so. But some people cannot afford this.
For those who can't afford one, corporate sponsorship can be obtained. As payment for a basic PDA on your wrist, you let them print a color animated advertising banner onto your forehead.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I would put "whereis" on my codpiece, because not many females seem to know where to find it.
I'd like to think it's because they're just not looking, but it's been long enough that I'm ready to accept the worst.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
You could paint all the walls, then use cameras to display on the wall what you would see if the wall wasn't there -- it would give the effect of having see-through walls (one-way).
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
Tried to design one a few years ago, but this might make it possible. Imagine a globe that could be updated via the web or disc, could illustrate the route of a voyabe or flight paths or tectonic drift, or weather, satellite orbits....
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
Now Transvestites can look like the opposite sex without surgery! What will they think of NEXT? Today truely is a leap for mankind, Man can finally be a part of the Brag of the Female SubGenius!
Paste On Genitalia.. who would have thought?!?
-=-Ze End-=-
If you could put a roof on your house with this material, it could be used to improve energy efficiency. Clear - like a giant skylight turning your house into a greenhouse. White/reflective in the summer to reflect the sunlight off of your house. Black, to absorb the heat, but keep the interior dark.
How about a grid of paint on solar cells to power it alternated with three color lcd photopours and programmable Artificial Life processors in a spatial "Beowulf cluster". And just for fun 3-D stereograms.
...Now I can hack a "Kick Me" pop-up ad on my friends back and do away with this nasty paper and tape!
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
Well, I know where the e-mail SPAM would appear... :-)
"I told you never to call me on this wall! This is an unlisted wall!"
"I'll be staying on Mars, two weeks... two weeks... two weeks..."
Here.
-><- no
There was a big hoopla about Electronic Ink developed at MIT about five years ago. Outside of an occasional demo at a trade show, I haven't seen much use of this product.
Whats the difference techincally and commercially between this new product and e-ink?
Dontcha?
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Now all those serial killers in the movies who are making suits out of women's skin can just press a button.
From an architectural standpoint, this kind of an innovation is rather exciting. Quite a lot of research has been going into office space customization and such things, and one of the big pieces that they haven't been able to tackle is that even in an extremely modular office system (read cubicles or similar) the colors and materials are, frankly, not changeable. So if you're stuck next to a dark wall, you're screwed. If you can alter the patterns and colors of your cube, all that becomes a user customization issue, and with a little work (and a lot of vRAM) people will be able to display anything from daisies to VoodooLights. *Now* imagine piping your xmms/winamp display into the walls of your room/cube. Or any screensaver for that matter... yay smurfs!
The idea of wearable LCD fabric sounds really extremely cool at first - but how would you do laundry? Dry-clean only, I guess?
... For the porn industry!
My sig sucks.
All of these Bradbury allusions got me thinking.
Combine the suit(or the bodypaint version), a very fast wireless connection, solar power, a P2P app and no off switch and you get the Illustrated man.
Hook him into a survilence network and watch the fun.
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
I'd be slighly more concerned with my pants suddenly turning transparent...
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
What happens when people look at you from a 60 degree angle? They see a smeared version of the straight on image. So, unless you stay face on to all the enemy, all the time, you're going to be visible.
My Journal
I can get the video-wall like in Total Recall.
-Turkey
-Turkey
"The technique should feed people's thirst for smaller, cheaper gadgets. Conventional glass LCDs now make up an increasing part of a laptop's weight - plastic versions could change that"... I think I'd rather have a heavier, clearer display than a lighter but fuzzy one. This technology will have to be better than conventional LCD's before it is adopted in a laptop.
Murphy was an optimist.
Which leads to another problem: with an LCD-suit, where would you put which app?
Errr...wonder where you'd put "touch"?
Has anyone thought of the VR that could be built with this. Sounds like you could change any room in your house into a holodeck if you have this LCD paint.
Oh my Good! How Microsoft is going to deal with crushing pants? What, another patch in my new Armani suit?
This would be soooo cool.. punching in an RGB code and changing the color of your car.. I don't think cops would like it too much.. "I'm pulling over a red.. no black.. no green.. no blue, mustang.. "
Popup ads sure would suck... Man, your walking down the street wearing your LCD suit and then because of an email you recieve, ads suddenly start popping up all over your body... pr0n on your ass and viagra ads on your crotch!
Much of the research on 'painting' displays onto flexible substrates are about Organic LEDs (OLEDs) rather than LCDs. The AP article mentions this and shows a picture. The thing about OLEDs is that they generate light and so don't need a backlight. And once the technology matures, they will actually cost about half of an LCD/backlight while using less power. One thing they are trying to do before getting into the market bigtime is giving them a longer life. Meanwhile, we'll be seeing them in things like cell phones where the display isn't lit all the time. Motorola has a couple on the market. Sony and Samsung have already shown 13 and 15 inch full color displays.
Some of these OLEDs can be 'painted' on by a simple inkjet process. Manufactuers could use a continuous process to make the stuff in long rolls like wallpaper and just cut it to size. You need some kind of substrate in order to address each pixel, but the substrate can be a very thin, very flexible plastic. Not only does this make the whole display paper-thin, but you could roll up a relatively big display like a windowshade! If you've seen "Earth: Final Conflict" you've probably seen their communicator which is like a pen, but you pull out a video screen from the side of it. This technology could make such a gadget. Also, things like the datapad seen on "Star Trek: TNG," a thing like a thin notepad they pass around, but which has a video pad and touch display. And of course you could paste it on a tablet computer, or a wall.
OLED (Organic LED) would be much better. LED requires battery power to maintain the refresh, while OLED only requires battery power to delta the image. OLEDs are currently in manufacturing (some Pioneer stereos and JCPenny signs). They are cheaper to produce, and more usable.
http://www.google.com/profiles/malachid
"Homes of the future could change their wallpaper from cream to cornflower blue at the touch of a button"
Given the shoddy quality control of current laptop screens, perhaps a warning be given to only select impressionist or pointilist backdrops, so all the missing pixels dont stand out too much!
Makes me think that people (I am sure the military have that in mind already) will use it to try to create the "predator" suit ... which shows to your eyes the surrounding view ... may be rather interesting ...
... better make sure to have enough batteries on hand (which makes you wonder where to hide it now) ;)
Of course since it will have to be skin tight to work efficiently that means running naked under that transparent film
-- Martial MICHEL
... Does this outfit make my App look big?
Have none of you read "The Light of Other Days"? by Clarke (Yes that Clarke) and Baxter? They have these things all over the place. Roll it up take it with you, browse from anywhere. And yes they even have the 'smart shrouds' you're talking about. Check it out it's only $6 on Amazon.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Bumper Stickers! Set it up with a depth-measurement tool and have your back bumper switch from "My child is a Superkid" to "Back Off, Ass-hole!" whenever someone gets a little too close. Clever sayings from banner ads! Hippy, swirly colorful things!
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
The LCD suit reminds me of the technology Gibson describes one of the teenage dissidents wearing in Neuromancer. The kid keeps projecting art and disturbing images on himself. Now that would be cool.
Whenever I get pissed at someone, I just turn on my goatse.cx underwear, drop my pants and bend over.
That's right on the money. I've been an observer at a field artillery staff exercise. Some of their work is automated, but a great deal of it is not. What do they use for information display? Post-It tape flags on a big map, each carefully annotated by hand. What do they use for information exchange? You walk over to the S-2's tent and look at his map for a while. Very, very low-tech. But it gets the job done.
What do they need instead? A big, flat, high-resolution display that you can hang on the tent wall -- and that you can roll up, toss in the back of the truck with all the other shit when it's time to move (maybe in a big hurry), and expect it to work later. The rest of the hardware and software is easy by comparison.
Wow, what an idea this is! I made the trip up to "The cave" a while back. Imagine what a whole room of LCD walls would be like. I've told my wife before that I want a game room. Now I really want a GAME ROOM.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
A few other posters have asked about how to wash a LCD suit. I was reminded of something I saw on TechTV the other day. They build a liquid cooled machine with the moderating liquid poured directly onto the CPU. Turns out this liquid is totally inert. If I remember correctly, it was Chlorofluoroether, but I'm not sure. Anyway, it's sold by 3M mainly to cool supercomputers. Drawbacks are it evaporates insanely quickly (as is to be expected with an ether), and it costs a few hundred dollars a jug. Now all that's left is to find a non-volatile soap to break up the dirt and whatnot so it can be carried away by the ether. And of course a device to filter the ether. And the fact that all this has to be done in a totally closed system to avoid extravagant laundry bills. On the up side, drying time is greatly decreased..
Except you'd keep getting hacked by people from countries with border disputes -
Seriously, though, I once saw a spherical jigsaw puzzle globe from a company that would send you updated pieces when borders changed.
You've motivated me to go and see what the latest Xearth programs are like - RedHat used to include it years ago and it was a cool program - lots of configurable options beyond the defaults. I wonder if it's been updated with those great satellite images I saw here a month or so ago...
Off to google...
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
I caught some virus that changed my suit to plaid, and it won't let me change it back!
If you could paint a flexible piece of plastic with this you could make a dome shaped screen, like at the planetarium, or a cube shaped, or a digital crystal-ball.
Not sure if this is useful for anything ( a globe maybe?) but it sure is cool.
Ooh, terra-form maps! that would be useful.
piece!
Sorry, just saw the Star Trek movie "Insurrection" last night...
What happens when people project front and back nude images? Would they get arrested for public nudity? What happens when your significant other projects front and back images of your favorite film star / hottie? Would they get mad at you for even asking? Heck I can see a whole cottage industry springing up around this technology.
BTW - Samsungs 21.3" LCD Monitor mentioned in one of yesterdays post supposedly has a 170 deg viewing angle. Coupled with the wrap around effect of cloth this could actually be very doable. I only wonder how many cameras at different angles would be required.
now, a giant multi coloured etch-a-sketch would be impressive...not only can you change the colour...but you can make big squiggly lines too. maybe there's a solution for those people that still use white out on their monitors....
Windows.....just another pane in the glass.....
The end is coming soon (I think)...
Now it seems that pleasure can justify slavery, at least, in cases of extreme danger: like a bomb...
Thank's god that I am not a rat, or a pig, or an ape!:) :) :) Am I?
Rwe obliged 2 save our future by choosing:O3 hole-greenhouse effect instead of accepting everydays gossip-nonsense chat?
"War makes me sad." - Me
I'll have Windows by the balls, for a change.
Dear Will, the plums were poisoned. -- Cheese Club
Be sure to check out xplanet (xplanet.sourceforge.net) - it is basically XEarth++, and it is awesome. Works in *nix and windoze, and with simple scripts it will download near-live satellite cloud imagery (updated every ~6 hrs, I think) for rendering the earth. It also supports loading and displaying weather data from the net (like XEarth displays city names), which in combination with the live clouds makes for a fun way to get an intuitive grasp of weather and weather forecasting by watching the whole world over time.
Slick stuff.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I don't want to have to touch the "I accept" section of my sleeve before putting on my shirt, or be forced to wear the corporate logo on my back because moving or deleting it violates my clothing user agreement. And no more hand-me-downs! The clothes would be licensed for one person only - give it away and the new owner pays again to wear it.
Nightmare.
...Shadows.
While you theoretically could camouflage yourself, light being blocked by you would still register on objects around you.
Unless there were thousands of miniature lights along with thousands of cameras and millions of pixels. Nah.
DoC
k?
This story reminds me of the scene in the movie Total Recall with the secretary. She's at her desk in the Total Recall office and she it painting her nails by tapping on a color palette and then tapping on her fingernail with a stylus. I am glad that it reminds me of that scene and not the one where they cut off the air supply (good band!) on Mars. That part of the movie was just depressing.
Blond joke
Q: How do you tell if a blonde is using a computer:
A: There's white-out on the screen
Geek joke
Q:How do you tell if a geek is writing on a piece of paper.
A:There's screen on his white-out.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
I painted the baby room 7 goddam times to get the right shade of yellow.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
Everyone seems to be talking about the obvious ads, rave visualizations, and blending into the wall, but what about schools?
If I could have my shirt sleeve display calculus equations, or biology terms, or whatever else I needed, college would have been so much easier. And if it could be turned off and on at will, then how would they ever be able to detect cheating like this? I mean, its kind of obvious when I pull out a palm in the middle of a test, that something is going on, but who's going to think anything if I look at my sleeve?
Or we could see people forced to wear this, as "foretold" in Revelations 15-17:
[15]And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.
[16] And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
[17] And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
Stuffit Expander sold with extra-large LCD-painted condoms.