Digital Wallpaper to Start Rolling Out in Japanese Homes

  • Posted on: 1 April 2009
  • By: chw staff

According to this months issue of NewScientist magazine homes in Japan are to start installing digital wallpaper, before the end of this year.  This is a very interesting concept, the ability to change the colour and theme of your decor whenever you want to.

According the magazine the Digital Wallpaper tiles will be 5-millimetre thick and is “called SmartBricks, the tiles consist of an array of liquid-crystal pixels. The pixels can be switched on and off electronically and made to reflect areas of red, green or blue light which build up into a colour image. Once the image is formed, no power is needed to maintain it.”

The SmartBrick system will retail for $2500 per square metre.  At the moment the Digital Wallpaper system only shows static images. The liquid-crystal in the tiles relies on ambient light to illuminate the image, producing a softer picture than backlit liquid-crystal displays. The effect, say its developers, is akin to that produced by real wallpaper.

I wonder what the temperature of the homes will be especially in the summer, because Japan is very humid in the summer – even though the suppliers (Magink) said the tiles have no embedded light source.

source: NewScientist

topics: