Digital Wallpaper to Start Rolling Out in Japanese Homes

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