These four glowing walls

"It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet is filled with a soft radiance." This is part of the opening paragraph to E. M. Forster's short story The Machine Stops, in which he describes a small room where the walls themselves glow and light the room. Now, 100 years after its publication, this concept is becoming a reality.

End of the light bulb? ^‡

The Carbon Trust has just awarded UK company Lomox Ltd. £454 000 to develop this technology. The final product will likely be some form of wallpaper comprised of flexible films of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), which could produce light more efficiently than existing consumer light sources and could lead to a reduction in carbon emissions if widely adopted.

As with all artificial lighting, the bandwidth of the light source - that is the constituent colours that make up the white light that we perceive - needs to be carefully considered, but the developers of this technology will have to consider the psychology of lighting in new ways: We are accustomed to illumination that comes from single or multiple sources, all of which cast shadows and create regions of contrasting luminosity, but uniform lighting from the walls of a room will create a very different effect. Some people are already complaining that new, energy efficient light bulbs are causing them nausea and headaches, and some are stockpiling the old tungsten bulbs which they replace. It will be interesting to see how well this glowing wallpaper will be received.

This science fiction concept could soon be a real part of our lives, perhaps in our living rooms in just a few years, but this is just one application for flexible OLED films. They might also be used for flexible screens to replace the humble newspaper, or integrated into the fabrics of clothing for people who really want to stand out in a crowd.