Sharkmeat

There I was staring at the hotel room ceiling where the avant garde designer had usefully placed slightly-psychedelic paisley black and white wall paper.

Well, ceiling paper in this case.

What did I notice?

First, that gravity is a fucker. The seams were lifting.

I then imagined a specialist handyman, the Michaelangelo of Canberra, going through all the rooms with a syringe with a special glue to re-submit the seams against the powers of entropy.

Then I bemoaned the unwanted intrusions of the two down-lights and especially the smoke sensor. A million dollars to the genius that designs a pretty smoke sensor. They don’t have to be ugly off-white plastic prosthetic aids now do they? One could do a flush fitting little chrome number. Anything.

In fact, I have always hated the little green LEDs that flash all night. Which dickhead committee thought it was OK to ruin every hotel guest’s rem/zen sleep? You really only need the LEDs to flash when there is a problem, like a low battery.

If it is absolutely necessary to have an ‘OK is powered’ notification then you could simply have a static notifier like the old US Telechron clocks that synchronised to, and ran off mains power. If they ever lost power a little static red indicator would automatically flick on. So the owners would then know the time showing was wrong due to a power outage at some time.

Moving past the extensions extending eccentrically from the ceiling paper, I then started imaging what the swirls were on the ceiling. Variably I saw sharks, birds, more birds, the odd jelly fish, and a few other animals. I am sure each of us would see it differently but few would admit such musings even to themselves, unless we were five years old.

And then I thought, wouldn’t it be nice if the ceiling paper ‘changed’ every now again? Using something like e-ink technology, every day the paper could slowly morph to give the owner (in the case of home installation) an ever-changing series of animals to spot.

In fact without the morphing paper I wouldn’t like this stuff above my bed and head. I would get frustrated at seeing the same animals over and over. And possibly even more so that I couldn’t see animals that I had seen previously. Eventually I would tear it down in frustration. And have you ever removed wall paper? It’s a fucker of a job that uses these special hand-held steamers developed by one of Lucifer’s off-siders. Doing it on the ceiling would be untenable.

The lovely thing about e-ink technology that could be used for the morphing ceiling paper is that it doesn’t consume power unless the display is changing.

Now there is a product worth developing.

Years ago (and I know I am now rambling) when I was working in Holland (early 1990’s) I was asked to help develop the e-ink technology when they first started their efforts. It involves the use of polymer colloid particles that move between electrodes and carries the pigment. It really is electronic paper.

I declined on the grounds that ‘it would never work in my lifetime’. Well that turned out not to be true. But to be fair it didn’t get into the e-book market, it’s first true application of merit, until well into the late naughties. I don’t have that much patience; actually I have bugger all, so I am still happy with my call.

You could imagine that morphing ceiling paper would very quickly be adapted for Gen Y’s to show their overnight facebook updates which they could read first thing in the morning. That would save them the phone grab until they had had a chance to wake-up a little.

Or you could add visual mood indicators to the ceiling paper, using brain sensors in the room, so couples could get a ‘heads up’ visual indicators of what they can expect off each other for the day. For example, ‘I feel like being stroked and cuddled this morning’.

And you could co-opt the technology for wallpaper too. Reaching back to my ‘wall of music’ idea you could have a wall of music albums that change daily or hourly so when touched you could hear new music all the time. That would keep the people that like listening to new music happy as well.

The possibilities are endless. ly. banal.