The effect is reciprocal, and when a piezoelectric material is subjected to an electric field, a small change in physical dimensions takes place.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a piezoelectric generator sufficient to operate a liquid crystal display using thin films of M13 bacteriophage.

(Narrator) The city would use the best of clean technology in harmony with nature, such as wind, solar, geothermal heat concentrators, piezoelectric, wave, temperature differentials ocean thermal vents and much more.

And if we can actually provide feedback, sensory signals that go back from this robotic, mechanical, computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain, back to the brain, how the brain deals with that, of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery.

And if we can actually provide feedback, sensory signals that go back from this robotic, mechanical, computational actuator that is now under the control of the brain, back to the brain, how the brain deals with that, of receiving messages from an artificial piece of machinery.

And we make a mathematical model of those relationships and program them into a tablet computer so that when you take the stylus and go and touch the screen, that voice coil actuator in the white bracket plays vibrations to give you the illusion that you're touching the real surface, just like if you touched, dragged back and forth, on the real canvas.