Every morning I cross read the headlines in the daily emails I receive from the New York Times and the Washington Post. This morning clutching my big mug of coffee a link to a news item in the New Scientist hit me. Reportedly the Canadian and US olympic ski team don new suits this year which are laced with a thin tissue which hardens on impact and then becomes soft again just as quickly. No more clunky hard plastic armor just a perforated layer of polymers that know what to do when hit with a slalom stick. Wow, what a great reminder that I am living on the threshold to a world in which intelligent materials dominate technological advances. At this point I got very excited. True, Velcro and GoreTex were great but in no way do they even start to outline the kind of change in our daily routines I thought to see so clearly back when I first read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. At the relatively young and impressionable age of somewhere in my early twenties having ingested every word of my newly discovered hero's seventh book I developed a sense of anticipatory euphoria and maybe even a little smugness of someone in the know. I knew that a future with flying cars



and big, fat, earth orbiting space stations was the picket fence, Doris Day version of a future much more intricate in structure and alien in its sensual experiences.



Instead I expected to live in a future that would feel very familiar in its daily life routines but relied on technologies which would change the contents of these very routines and make life seem alien from a today's perspective. And it's true, the existence of the International Space Station does not perceptibly change my daily life. The existence of Teflon does.

Here are an article on Neal Stephenson originally published in WIRED magazine, his old and very unattractive website with a lot of information and his new very small Flash based website that looks a little better but I can't find any information. Hmmm... Mr. Visionary, what's going on there?

Anyway, this ski suit article took me back a few years to when SF really matterded to me. So I dive into my treasure chest of bookmarks hunting for similar technologies the development of which I have observed with peripheral vision in the last few years. Here is a company calledE·INK that manufactures a new display technology which does not rely on emitting light but instead changes it's surface so it almost looks like print on paper.



A company called Plasticlogic has a little movie online that shows a page change on one of these b/w displays in 100ppi and in Japan there is a wall-sized newspaper that uses E·INK technology

And what's up with photovoltaics and semiconductors? Organic light-emitting polymers that can be transfered onto any material with bubble-jet printing technology,



coating just about any regular object with what amounts to a display. The Philips cell phone 639 shows animations and the telephone number of incoming calls on it's clam shell exterior. Or cooler yet, just a simple sheet of plastic that emits light when under current and works like a large area solid state display. They are energy efficient and emit colors ranging from the near UV to the near infrared. Simple examples are already reaching the consumer market. There is a wooden desk which due to its polymer coating is its own desk lamp.



Imagine cars without trailer lights. The whole back of a car will be able to light up instead or display written messages. Combined with thin film polymer solar cells and polymer rechargeable batteries these structures are becoming independent from external energy sources.

Update March 22. 2006:
Smart concrete that changes color.