Smart Materials

Just interested to know what you guys know and think about smart materials?

D3O is actually so awesome! It's Manipulation has so many uses! 
Thermochromic pigmentation is used a fair bit as well for food hygiene and in medical equipment which is cool!

There's some pretty cool stuff being developed at the moment. One of my favourites are the nanoparticles they can put in packaging that change colour when the food inside goes off - it saves all the faffing around that you get with sell-by dates, use-by dates, best before dates and all that jazz which really drives me up the wall sometimes

They've got one in development to create a pressure sensitive trackpad. Like computer trackpads can tell where you are, but these will test how hard you are pressing-changing how we work! Its so clever!

What exactly is the purpose of that?
I don't quite understand you, sorry!

I can't remember exactly, but it was a plastic that released an electric charge when put under pressure, the more pressure the more charge. It was something to do with modelling and gaming they were starting to use it for.

The things we can achieve today is outstanding... I'm just waiting for these phones which can be wrapped around your wrists, using conductive gold sheets only a few atoms thick. Knowing we'll see all this stuff in our lifetime is pretty awesome