While most people were on holiday over Christmas and the New Year, we ran a campaign to promote a new kind of digital wallpaper developed by a collaboration of European scientists called LUMENTILE.

Our story went global, with media around the world wanting to cover the announcement of these smart, digital tiles that can change colour, produce pictures (individually or as part of a group of tiles acting as a large screen), or play videos.

With the ability to fit the tiles externally to buildings or even vehicles and create an instant camouflage, some speculated they ‘could even make a building disappear’. News reports included the Daily Mail, Yahoo News, Nature World, and Digital Arts.

The story was covered in 11 different countries and reported on 98 individual websites, with a reach of over 880 million unique visitors per month. Matter PR has estimated that the story has had a readership of approximately 29.3 million individuals worldwide.

The ‘Luminous Electronic Tile’, or LUMENTILE, project uses sophisticated touch screen technology and is the first time anyone has tried to embed electronics into ceramics or glass for a large-scale application. With the ability to play videos or display images, the tiles allow the user to turn their walls into a large ‘cinema’ screen, where each unit acts as a set of pixels of the overall display.

A combination of ceramic, glass and organic electronics, the luminous tile includes structural materials, solid-state light sources and electronic chips and can be controlled with a central computer, a smart phone or tablet.

Project Co-ordinator, Professor Guido Giuliani of the University of Pavia explains: “You are instantly in control of your own environment: if you don’t like your bathroom in blue, now you can change it to green with one tap. If you like flowery wallpaper, ducks or Christmas trees, that’s up to you… It may sound like the stuff of James Bond but external tiles would create a ‘chameleonic skin’, or instant camouflage. Although we are a long way off this yet, this would allow a car or building to blend completely into its surroundings, and hence disappear.”

Earlier this year LUMENTILE received a grant of € 2,470,113.75 from Horizon 2020 via the Photonics Public Private Partnership. Hoping to be available to users in two years the LUMENTILE project aims at mass production by the end of 2020.

Find out more about our global photonics campaigns here.