>> What I did see, that was quite interesting, was a guy who "studies
>> nature" to try to look for clever ideas that we can copy. One of his
>> suggestions was to create colour by diffraction rather than using
>> chemical dyes. Chemicals degrade in the Sun, but a grating doesn't
>> suddenly change size just because you hit it with a ton of UV...
>
> Presumably you'd need a layer of protection on top of the diffraction
> grating anyway to prevent damage, so I struggle to see any advantage
> than just putting a UV protective coating on top of a normal
> plastic/paint (like cars have for example).

Presumably what you do is make a translucent layer which has inclusions 
inside it that refract the light. So the outer surfaces are smooth, yet 
you still get colour. Hard to see how you could do that cheaply though.

Has anybody invented a UV coating that actually works yet?

>> Fibre to the house is a simple concept. Why didn't they do this before?
>> Oh, yes, that's right - because fibre is so astronomically expensive
>> that nobody can afford it...
>
> And why is it now possible to make it so much cheaper than before?
> Perhaps because there have been new manufacturing processes invented and
> developed and new materials? But wait, nothing has changed since the
> industrial revolution!

I'm sure things have changed. Just perhaps not as rapidly and 
dramatically as the original revolution.

> I think I posted this before, but a friend from University set this up:
>
> http://lightblueoptics.com/videos/holographic-laser-projection-technology/
>
> Given that he appears to have won several times in the IOCCC recently
> (tangental, but a full PC emulator capable of running DOS games in under
> 4KB of C source?!) I guess it didn't come to much :-)

This is very interesting. From what I can gather, the primary problem is 
the absurd amount of computer power required. (Oh, and the fact that 
it's currently only monochrome - again, presumably due to computer power.)

I would imagine making something like this for static images would be 
comparatively easy. The hard part is doing moving images. (Aside from 
computer power, data transfer rates might be problematic too...)

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