Concrete that can display information

It's just a concept for right now, but three designers at the "Innovation Unit" of the Royal College of Art in London have created a design for concrete that can double as an information display. Called Chronos Chromos Concrete, it's basically concrete that's mixed with thermochromic ink and with nickel chromium wires installed right below or behind. When you want to display specific words or information or whatever you just heat up the right wires and they cause the concrete just above or in front to change color. Sounds like it's a long way off from commercialization, and the worst part is that if any of the wiring breaks you have to bust out the jackhammers to make repairs.

[Via Near Near Future]

[Rookie @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Could this concrete display chromatically encoded messages like the BGMask Privacy Enh. does on a pc's screen?

[joe hagerman @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Nothing new or novel here, just some heating wires below thermochromic pigment wrapped in a concrete package.

I'm working on something similiar at a university, but we are using plastic in the concrete which contains pigment and electrically conductive additives that heats when energized. Our version doesn't display images, it just turns the entire slab of concrete a color. Although I think I've managed to come up with a way to actually strengthen the concrete by adding a matrix of heating arrays which would produce a concrete slab similiar (but superior (i.e. less energy, less manufacturing costs, etc)) than the concrete shown above.

This, I think, is the difference in getting an engineer to tackle the problem rather than a bunch of art students...

[macbot3000 @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Chronos Chromos Concrete

Say that fast three times.

[sickpuppy @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

You have to ask 'why?' really...

what's wrong with a nice LED display, plasma panel or projector

seems a bit pointless tbh

[Ian @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Why not just imbed some fiber optics in the concrete.(Like the sidewalks at Disneyland) Seems a little convoluted for what you could use it for.

[rlarue @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Litracon is way cooler than this, it's translucent thanks to glass fibers which are embedded into the concrete. Their webpage www.litracon.com is down but optics.org has some info on 'em at http://optics.org/articles/news/10/3/10/1

[Christopher Glaister @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Hi, I�m one of the three who invented Chronos Chromos Concrete. As it happens we are not just art students, we are all jointly qualified as engineers and industrial designers, (That�s to Joe by the way).

We have also developed ways of making entire slabs change colour, the report is pretty misleading, there is no need for jack hammers to repair the current system.

If you want to contact me use [e-mail]. I�m now working on commercialising the product, so drop me a line if you have any interesting leads, or would like to get involved.

[Christopher Glaister @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

Sorry, Chronos Chromos Concrete the enquires e-mail is [e-mail] not .com

[protein @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

some good discussion on this and it's use of the already trademarked "chromo" name here:
http://forum.proteinos.com/viewtopic.php?t=1417

[college @ Dec 19th 2005 12:09AM]

As long as we don't end up with 12:00 blinking continuously, on every concrete overpass, and structure...