"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....

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....

'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.' [Nature, via Slashdot]

This has definite implications for ebooks, PDAs, and wearable computers, among other things. Can the OQO be made even lighter? Or maybe you'll just plug it into your jacket and look at your sleeve. Does this make computer displays embedded in glasses even more feasible? Could I project a map onto the corner of my car's windshield using my PDA? So many ideas....