Magnetic Pixels Enable Screen to Store, Display Encrypted Images Without Electronics
A flexible screen partly inspired by squid can store and display encrypted images like a computer: using magnetic fields rather than electronics. The screen could be used wherever light and power sources are cumbersome or undesirable, e.g., clothing, stickers, ID badges, barcodes, and e-book readers. Watch this video to learn more.
“It’s one of the first times where mechanical materials use magnetic fields for system-level encryption, information processing and computing. And unlike some earlier mechanical computers, this device can wrap around your wrist,” said Joerg Lahann , the Wolfgang Pauli Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering and co-corresponding author of the study.
Transcript
00:00:02 the main advantage of these devices is that you can still display a lot of complex information but without the need of any [Music] Electronics can see [Music] thees electronic displays and systems can be hacked right especially for
00:00:29 security so there's been a switch to transitioning to more um analog physical encryption systems in this project we're trying to reproduce some of the display functions that you see in the skin of squids squid sometimes they flash their patterns to convey information to each other in their case what they're using is they're like expanding and
00:00:54 Contracting their muscles and squishing these little sacks of pigment to show like more of a darker or a lighter uh color in our case we have adapted that concept by using these particles that have two sides one that is light and one that is dark by giving a magnetic fields we can control the rotation all these particles right and we can control which particles rotate and how they rotate so
00:01:21 with a programmed magnetic field we can store the magnetic information into our particle system and with a just regular magnetic field we can show that information so then we can really write and encode some complex information like images some Dynamic messages Etc into these uh flexible devices so this is not a conventional display but a display plus a small
00:01:53 computer because this is all this all encased on a on a soft flexible device it's very portable and it can be used on many different applications right for like wearable sensors for like smart IDs you can think of this as a smart barcode that can only display information after several layers of security so we can program uh the the message for this so that it will only react to one specific
00:02:20 pattern that person a holds right and if person B uh tries to read it it will be nothing it will be like a public encrypted m message and person C that has a different key can get a different personalized message so this is more for protection of of of data uh in very low cost application later we can expand this into more color range maybe into RGB color channel so that we can review
00:02:50 more colors and more combinations of this encryption we're very excited about how this will change how we make uh uh Display Devices we have opened a bunch of new properties and and functions that they were not possible before and it all comes from the the design and Engineering of these these smart particles [Music]