Adjustable Color Paint, possible with nano technology?

Would there be a way to design nano particles that can somehow change the wavelength that they reflect light? This would be like a type of ink or dye that changes color as a response when the frequency of an inaudible transmission was present. So you could paint a room once and then change the color to whatever you wanted by remote control.

Since Amazon developed that hand-held electronic book that uses actual ink in its LCD and isn't backlit, this seems like it could be a possibility for walls. Only to use LCD technology would require putting up large panels, which would have seams and probably couldn't be cut to fit.

So if some kind of nano particles could be designed that are suspended in paint, you could customize the color of things with a remote control or dial.

I don't know about nano particles, but they do have LCDs now that are paper thin and flexible. So eventually you'll be able to just get a bunch of smaller lcds and glue them to your wall.

Paint that changes its colour with temperature already exists. Not even nanotech.

Ok, but what if I want the room to be orange at 78 instead of red but I don't want to turn the thermostat down to 72? RC Nanopigmentation: coming soon at WalMart 21st century!

I am not sure If we can do that. Let me know if u folks have succeded in doing it...

Yes its possible with nanotechnology. A number of places are working at this. In addition there is whats called quantum dots which have a spectrum of different colors.

Basically light color is based on frequency, all you have to do is change the frequency of the particle to change its color.

I think you could also have a three-color system like with TVs or LED big screens. Then you just have to control the relative brightness of the three monochrome dye particles. Wouldn't that be easier than modulating the frequency of particles?

Slight problem with this idea.
Even if each "particle" was capable of displaying either different colors or different brightnesses, there is no way to coordinate them. The process of painting something doesn't allow for any kind of control circuit. Each "particle" would have to think for itself.

On the other hand, this would be plausible to do with wallpaper.

I was thinking that all the nano-particles would have simple radio receivers to control them by remote. Then you would just need some inaudibly high-pitched frequency to tell the nanobots which color to display.

Wall paper is a good idea but the circuitry sounds like it would have to be planned. Plus wall paper has seems and is difficult to hang. Painting is much easier, imo.

Where exactly are these particles receiving power from? (nano batteries are not an option)
How does the controller know which particles are where?
What kind of binder would you use to keep all the nano particles together without covering them up?
What do you do with all the wasted particles that are hidden behind the binder and other nano particles?

Wallpaper is a much better option, and doesn't have any of those problems.

I think I would take the wallpaper's cost savings and superior image quality over the ease of paint.

are nano photovoltaics and rechargeable battery cells a possibility? If so they could harness and store light for energy.

Why would the controller have to know the specific location of the particles? It just sends out a certain ultra high frequency pitch sound and the particles respond to that frequency with a certain color combination.

I'm assuming that these particles will be easy to replicate and manufacture in mass quantities enough that you can coat the wall in them, suspended in some form of transparent or translucent polyurethane lacquer.

How would the wallpaper be made? Would it need an intricate network of circuitry to get power and signal to all the color particles? If so, it would probably require a large printer of some sort to embed the circuitry into the wallpaper.

If it was just a question of creating lots of conductive fibers that are spread out, which randomly connect with each other to form circuitry, why not just paint that directly onto the wall instead of using wallpaper?

I guess this answers my question at the beginning of this post. But why can't nano batteries be possible?

Are we talking about television paint or color-shifting paint?

I had something simple in mind where the nano particles would exhibit uniform behavior according to a certain frequency signal, i.e. 1 color for the whole wall.

TV paint is an interesting concept, though. If there was some way to get the particles to recognize their location, they could potentially act independently of each other, no?

This could probably be done by first painting the wall and then using some kind of scanning laser to program them according to location. Then each one could receive distinct per-pixel signal.

Ok, I thought you were talking about television paint, which is completely impractical.
Color-shifting wallpaper could be accomplished with electronic paper technology:
Electronic Paper

As far as power goes, photovoltaics probably won't work because the wallpaper needs to be a color that is not black. Thermal energy would probably be a better solution.

I think someone else already suggested electronic paper type technology.

Do you think room temperature would supply enough energy to power color particles?

Actually it might be if some kind of passive-dye system made it so that once a particular color configuration was achieved it would not rely on continuous power to maintain it, only to change it.

You would need to develop some kind of macro-molecule configuration that would change frequency on command.