At some time or the other, you might have seen this in a movie or an advertisement: a guy wants to say `I love you' to a girl and enlists friends and neighbours to switch on/off their lights to display the message, clearly visible from the girl's window or balcony.

That involves too much planning and too many obstacles, the hardest being cooperation and timing. But if things work out well for Chris Glaister, Afshin Mehin and Tomas Rosen and their Chronos Chromos Concrete prototype, the `I love you' spanning a whole building wouldn't just be an idea for the movies and ads.

The Chronos Chromos Concrete system can display numbers, text and patterns on the concrete surface, making any wall with the system a display unit. You could have a large digital clock on an office wall, or a patterned wall that changes every day in your bedroom, an exterior wall showing the temperature and so on.

The system uses a surface of concrete mixed with thermochromic inks, with a pattern of wires underneath. Depending on the pattern used, when electricity is passed through the wires, they heat up and change the colour of the heat sensitive inks mixed with the concrete. Thermochromic inks change colour when exposed to heat, and the colour change is reversible, meaning that the surface will revert to its original colour once the temperature goes down. Check out a short video of the working of the prototype at the system's website, http://www.chromastone.com to see it in action and visualise the possibilities.

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