Scientists are embarking on a project which they claim could one day see the insides of homes coated from top to bottom with organically-produced “television wallpaper”.

Because the film used to make the wallpaper is capable of emitting light, researchers involved with the project - being developed by Toshiba - foresee a feast of possible uses for the wallpaper including potentially replacing light bulbs as the default method of illuminating a room. In addition to displaying movies, soap-operas or the evening news on screens the size of an entire wall, the technology could be used to surround the family with a range of “lifestyle” footage, transforming a humble living-room into an island paradise at sunset, a seething rainforest or a submarine lair.

Toshiba claims the material’s energy consumption would only be a fraction of an LCD or plasma television, meaning it could just be used to display a different colour and pattern of traditional wallpaper every day according to the mood of the household.

The project is one of the core pursuits of the electronics firm’s nanotechnology division - the rapidly advancing field of science concerned with the manipulation of materials measuring one billionth of a metre. Toshiba’s ambitious plans, which exploit the self-assembling properties of certain molecules, were unveiled at Tokyo’s annual nanotechnology conference, one of the largest academic and industrial get-togethers of its type.

The event allowed scientists from across the globe to showcase a rich variety of new research areas, also including a nanotechnology project at Japan’s National Institute of Agrobiological Sciences that has found a way to convert a hornet’s nest into an immensely strong nylon-type fibre that may be woven into a pair of biodegradable, ladder-resistant tights.

With its mainstream electronics industries under severe economic threat, Japan’s most famous technology giants are increasingly abandoning many older research areas in favour of the more promising field of nanotechnology. The ability to manipulate materials at the atomic - or in some cases sub-atomic - level offers the prospect of a significant “paradigm shift” in electronics, medicine and manufacturing.

The field encompasses efforts to generate cables that are hundreds of times stronger and lighter than steel, the perfection of nano-sized robots capable of navigating inside our bodies fixing health problems, and molecule-sized computer processors able to perform at a vastly higher level than the most powerful semi-conductors on the market today.

Toshiba’s idea for television wallpaper arises from a breakthrough in the production of filters. The development of organic electroluminescence (OEL) screen technology has been in progress for many years - Sony already has a 12inch television that uses the low-energy substance - but larger screen sizes have been hampered by the way that the great majority of the light produced is actually trapped within the screen itself. Toshiba, by exploiting the way that silicon dioxide molecules arrange themselves in perfect hexagons has found a way to produce a “grating” that allows much more of the light to escape, dramatically enhancing the energy efficiency of the screen.