Create a Light Sensitive Wall
About one year ago, my friend Julien and I had to imagine an innovating idea for the renovation of a concert hall in our town. The place was dark and full of lights, as bars and clubs usually are. We asked ourselves the following questions: how could we make this place more attractive for the customers? Could we imagine an interactive feature not to difficult to implement and without spending a lot of money?
After a couple of days focusing on lights, I remembered an old research I made for school and came back with photoluminescent paint, found in a do-it shop. This paint is phosphorescent, it's "charged" by exposure to light and then releases light relatively slowly. The experiments started!
We tried to paint a wall with different layers, fist with the special paint, and then with basic black paint, in order to have dark walls. It did not work well, it was a bit frustrating. So we tried with the black paint first and then the photosensitive paint. It actually worked better but the color was awful. It looked like a dirty black wall with green traces. Finally we found a solution: mixing both colors directly! The result was great. A nice anthracite color and a good photosensitive result.
Process
What You Need
You can find this kind of paint almost everywhere. The most common color is green but there are a lot of different colors:
I tried the brand shown on the picture (moonglow) and the green was the more efficient color. The one I finally used was Jal-Safelight A-75, from a Swiss brand: Jallut.
For the black paint, I used basic acrylic wood paint.
We painted on a small surface and tried out with our phone's lights and a beamer. In the future, we'd like to try with laser lights.
The Final Idea
This is a little video we made to explain what we could do with those phosphorescent wall.