Slashdot Mirror
Light-Emitting Polymer Displays
BlackSol writes "Yahoo is covering a very cool piece on the development of roll-up screens. Possible uses from home televisions, to tele-watches, and military uses such as real-time satalite fed maps in the field."
Will this open the possibility for 3D tv using multiple transparant layers?
:)
Or perhaps the multi-channel edition where you have a book with 100 pages: every page is another chanel. Nice and convenient during the commecial breaks
--
... Reuters does. How about some editorial?
-- ellis D. trails
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
Cool, this could have some interesting applications.
I'm married to a great woman, I have no kids, and I like billy goats, you gotta problem with that?
I think this technology sounds cool; after all, with a light-emitting display, you could light a room and browse the web with the same piece of equipment. However, I question whether it is a good idea from a safety perspective. I foresee people being blinded by these things. Any thoughts?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
i would love to put this on my wall and make a 20 foot screen to watch my movies on
Got Athlon?
"People are talking about weaving displays into clothing. Will there ever be a mass market for that? I doubt it. But it will probably be seized on by someone." :)
Well, as long as it's a touch screen, I'm happy
{and slowly a song from the Who sets in: See me, feel me, touch me...}
can you say Big screen home theater.. without a projector?
I could wrap my pr0n around me......
I wonder if these can get high enough res. to be useful for laptop/handheld displays? That would sure be handy...
-Zordok
the obnoxious ceareal box animations...
There are many uses for this in areas with political instability. Now instead of having to go through the problem of making new flags and banners every time an area changes hands, you can just have one of these up each flag pole, and just change the image as the situation warrents. I can see applications for this on the west bank / parts of Africa already.
I am having visions of minority reports billboards, then again, perhaps not. What a cracker target that would be for defacing.
when are the prices on screens going to drop radicaly? If these are printed wouldn't theey be much cheaper to produce?
.sigless since 2003
"Roll-up televisions will allow viewers of the future to flip their sets out of sight like projector screens and will come with a similar price tag to bulkier boxes."
Does anyone else find this a little silly? The plastic film costs maybe a few dollars, the printing process probably no more than $25 for a moderately sized set, and then another $50 (retail) for an acceptable interface/controller module.
Alright, who wants to pay $1000 for a 48" screen that probably cost almost exactly the same to make as a 12" screen (for only $150)?
Karma: \Kar"ma\, n. [Skr.] (Buddhism) One's acts considered as fixing one's lot in the future existence.
Weave this bad boy into a full body suit, mount micro cameras throughout, project the image seen behind.
Voila! Predator. From twenty feet or so, anyway.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
I think roll-up TV (or a rollup notebook!) is a very nice gimmick, but what I'm always afraid of is that after a few days wrinkles appear, which will be quite difficult to remove. Does anyone know if this problem is addressed by researchers?
-- Cheers!
Salesperson - We have this lovely floral design...
Spork - Digital.
Salesperson - This one comes in great pastel colors.
Spork - Digital.
Salesperson - Damn it! The morons in electronics get the commisions for digital wallpaper! Buy the damn Pastel!
Spork backs slowly away.
With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
Make a pair of pants out of this stuff, and you can have the pants flash cliff-notes during exams.
Well, I am scrapping plans for #2 Linux pencils to focus on the pants now.
Table-ized A.I.
. . . military uses such as real-time satellite fed maps in the field.
Better make sure those satellite connections are really secure:
"All right, men, the enemy stronghold is dead ahead. Charge!"
[ten minutes later] "Uh, Sarge, we must have gotten turned around somehow, now it's directly behind us."
[fifteen minutes later] "Now it's saying we're in South-Central L.A. Stick together, men."
roll-up screens
For my fruit roll ups? It's already got red!
fuck that d00d, gimmie some movie-poster sized versions of that stuff to tack on my wall. or maybe i could stick some underneath my partially transparent tibook's keyboard! then i could finally see the damn keys in the dark... displaying porn on my keyboard would be nifty though :)
probably a cheaper solution....they have indeglo watches...they have indeglo "nightlights....do they make poster-sized versions of the stuff? or is there a maximum size as to how larger it gets before you can't run current safely across the stuff (some sort of gas mixture i would assume)
moox. for a new generation.
link
according to this (rather old (2001)) paper, lifetime of polymer dislpays is around 10.000 hours against usual TFTs living around 50.000 hours.
Let's assume they doubled it since 2001, its 20.000 hours.
Unless they produce them for the half of the costs of usual TFTs, I wouldn't like to throw away my TV every 2 1/3 years...
Now all we need is an array of miniscule cameras interwoven with the display layers to pass image ~through a body. Might work real well for flat, static things, like buildings. Less well for Predator and Snake, but workable.
Try my nuts to your fist style!
that most geeks being blinded by doing some other thing... :)
How difficult would it be to use this tech to make an interactive flight chart? Add in the GPS and you have a single chart for all flights as well as a moving map! This would save a lot of weight and clutter in the cockpit as well help streamline the cockpit management chores...landing? just touch the destination airport and suddenly you have a large scale approach chart! No more flipping through the flippin' book while trying to set up the approach!!
Got get my hands on some of this stuff!
For the sake of Peace, the Sword.
Just add a roll-up keyboard and you almost have one. Not sure about the mouse or CPU...
Crap....now I am going to be walking down the street and have X10 flashing pop-ups on my shirt.
Anyone ever seen Earth: Final Confilct. Admittedly, a pretty lame, soap-opera-ish show, but one of the tings I liked was the technology. How about a flexible screen that rolls up in an expandible phone. Like the globals they use on EFC. Hmm, specs for a global: Magnesium frame Dual Mode, supporting GSM, or any 3G 4 inch roll-up touch screen PalmOS 5x 32M RAM Intel X-Scale 400Mhz SD slot Integrated Bluetooth Integrated Camera That would be the last phone I bought...
----
Rob.
---
"Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
can someone post some information on these satalites mentioned in the article.. sounds interesting.
Alas, Babylon.
I've read about this technology a long time ago. It was hyped to be the technology to replace LCD monitors in the near future. Now it's the near future, and LCD monitors are still around, and still expensive! But how cool would it be to roll up your 27" monitor and take it to your LAN party?
No need to have separate Desert/Jungle Camo suites, just turn a dial, and it becomes the one you need. Or, if the power requirements are to much for a personal version us it on buildings, vehicles, tents, etc.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
...for this technology.
Cheap HUDs for autos (Heads Up Display) and bike helmets is an obvious application.
Televisions everywhere. (Okay, this could really suck; who wants to see ads for Cheer everywhere you go.)
And the big one: Wrap-around, full vision wearble displays. Granted, I'm stretching here, but one can dream, eh?
If this technology really works well, it could solve a great many problems associated with computer displays (size, heat generation, cost, etc.)
Lot's of really cool technology coming soon, makes the current despond somewhat more tolerable.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
Imagine wallpapering your room with this stuff and hooking it into some kind of CAVE type engine. Affordable holodeck.
...an article in Computer Shopper recently reported that the development could, were the cost of production to decrease sufficiently, result in animated displays being produced and used in things like product packaging - but who really wants animated cornflakes?
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Thats great, forget pr0n movies when you can order a pr0n movie t-shirt, great for watching pr0n on the go!
rm -rf sig
Imagine seeing a cityscape where every inch of every skyscraper is a billboard. Sound far-fetched? Read the article -- this is about printing televisions. These things are going to be cheap. Look at the end result of a technology such as the printing press becoming widely available -- we now have reams of printed matter everywhere we look. An active display technology that is so convenient to use and cheap to produce has just as much potential, if not more, for becoming pervasive and used everywhere.
I think the biggest question for widespread use of these things, on a commodity level rather than an appliance level (toilet paper, not PDAs), is power. I don't think anything on the market today is truly a satisfactory answer to the question of how to power ubiquitous flexible displays like these, but we're close. See a very recent slashdot post (no link, so lazy...) about flexible solar cells being developed. Also, there is an incredible push for greatly improved battery technology, and great steps are being made there.
Ultimately, there will be two kinds of uses for this technology. The first one we'll see will be the sort that is more or less permanently installed, and can therefore be plugged into the wall all or some of the time. Even the skyscraper-as-television fits into this category. But at some point you'll need batteries or solar cells or some other power source (some wacky nanotech?) to power more "disposable" applications like animated handbills, greeting cards, movie posters, etc.
End result: advertising is about to get a lot more annoying. Let's just hope they haven't got paper-thin speakers to go with this.
My deviantArt site
I doubt that a roll-up tv screen or monitor will ever be practical. Firstly, every pixel will have to be driven and that requires an electical connection. A 1024 X 768 will require atleast 786,433 electical contections, and wires made of metal. I expect serious problems with metal-fatigue induced conductor fractures, for roll-up displays. I'll admit that the ribbon cable inside a printer goes through a lot but it doesn't have a quarter of a million conductors either.
This has a lot of cool potential applications, but roll-up displayed will not be marketable
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I think I'd like one of a Penguin stomping on MS HQ...
Better still, if the material could be made thin enough and safe to implant under the skin you could have animated tattoos you could reprogram at will.
(I'd go for a penguin stomping on MS HQ again)
From my Autobiography - "Lifestyles of the Sad and Desperate"...
So that's where they got those cereal boxes in Minority Report.
One of the other pretty cool technologies being developed by the guys at Plastic Logic (a spin off company created by the same people from Cambridge University who formed CDT) is the ability to create full electronic devices by using an inkjet printer loaded with a cartridge of these conductive polymers. It would be pretty cool to be able to see a useful device on a web page, download the circuit, print it out of your inkjet and then have the working device straight away.
This LEP screen are definitely cool to look at, but how does this affect the desktop display market? If we are talking about fast-moving tv quality images, Then a desktop monitor made from a LEP can't be far behind.
There is no spork.
I can't seem to find anything about what kind of refresh speeds they can get from this, or energy consumption. Has anyone seen any current figures released by these people?
Regardless of how cool this could be, it'll be a dud unless it makes laptops last longer and has at least equal moving image quality compared with LCD screens.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Screen burn, or bad pixels,
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Exciting all the ladies out there, could be the though that there is NO LIMIT to lenght. The fesabillity of having a monitor that is 10 feet long and wraps arround is applicable with this tech... just print the screen on a long roll of plastic. flight sim, quake, vr for medica/military, pr0n... next best thing since Color TV? I'm excited (not just cause I typed p0rn) but because this could REALLY be a huge change for computers. Hooray! The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!
"I think we'll see a lot of innovation," said Fyfe. "People are talking about weaving displays into clothing. Will there ever be a mass market for that? I doubt it. But it will probably be seized on by someone."
So I'll finally get to shag someone in an AOL-style video-minidress - mmm, ohh...
Chuck Norris: Socialism == a thousand years of darkness.
Put one of these on a wall and then show the image of a door or passage and watch as the unsuspecting people walk right into it.
But more seriously, maybe something like this could be a replacement for windows (the things made of glass, not the OS). If there are cameras on the outside, this could just show the image on the wall. Make places more secure anyway, if there are no windows for people to break in through. I think that this would be able to succeed over current TVs because from the way it sounds, you can make some very large surfaces with it.
My other sig is an import.
This could be cool... change your clothes with the push of a button. Wear a new face (probably not a very realistic-looking one until the technology matures, but we're dreaming here...). Wear the skin of your favorite porn star. With adaptive padding it could modify the underlying shape as well.
My deviantArt site
Weave this bad boy into a full body suit, mount micro cameras throughout, project the image seen behind. Voila! Predator. From twenty feet or so, anyway. Multi quidem facilius se abstinent ut non utantur, quam temperent ut bene utantur.
Someone illuminates the whole area with a light that blinks at such a frequence, that you suit(due to the latency) is out of phase. : )
FRA: STFU GTFO
I can't wait until I goto work and when I sit down at my chair I slide forward into a "cave" and its a "U" shaped enclosure and my desktop is all around me.
I could apply this to the walls and ceiling of every room in my house.
I can see it now. Someone needs to setup a camera pointed at the sky in a part of the world with no light pollution (middle of the saharia?) and beam the image to a satalite so I could display it on my ceiling!
I could lay on my back and watch TV without sitting up!
I'm very excited about this! (if you couldn't tell!)
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
This is Cambrige Display Technology's white paper on how Light Emitting Polymers function.
Whouldn't they make great wallpaper.
Have seen how much current 48" screens cost? I'd be glad to pay that. It doesn't matter how much it cost to make. We will never get any product without a huge markup.
I'm sure I could find a nice new 14" monitor for my PC for only $60, but I'm gonna spend the $350 for a nice 19".
Sorry to break it to you but size does matter.
At least I know where my towel is.
If the cost to produce these things were cheap enough, this would make those marketing folks drool.
I can see it now...billboards, posters, on t-shirts, shoes (probably a nice little Nike commercial built next to their logo), and even as a free toy in my box of Lucky Charms.
Cambridge Display Technologies has a nice article
describing the underlying physics and some technical issues involved with developing the material.
--LP
Just think, if you were using Microsoft products - just about any of them - you`d just press F7 and they`d go `er...do you mean satellite?`.
Doesnt Linux software have a spell checker?
A quick search of reveals that along with the light emitting polymers, those capable of conducting electricity are also available, awaiting practical application.
Challenges to overcome still include transmission speed and resisitance - this has even been featured on before.
Any spoon would be too big.
The first manufacturer to bring this (or any) technology to market can charge whatever they want to (provided that people will actually pay their asking price), since you won't be able to get the product anywhere else. Once competition comes into the picture, prices will drop as they compete for your dollar, approaching the actual cost of production. It's the simple concept of supply and demand, not rocket science.
Philips has been working on flexible displays for quite some time:e r/Global/FArticleSummary.asp?lNodeId=670&channel=6 70&channelId=N670A1891
http://www.components.philips.com/InformationCent
I saw this amzing article about adaptive camouflage.......click here
I've been dreaming of my ultimate portable for some time, and this - roll-up screens - was all that was missing. I have a roll-up waterproof keyboard that works quite well. Imagine the guts of a notebook PC (no CD, keyboard, screen), a kind of brick the size of a stack of CDs. Fits into your pocket. You can add a flat battery underneath for portable use. You can plug in a roll-up screen and keyboard when you're on the road. At the office you dock it into your main notebook or desktop - synchronizing all your data, updating your email, etc.
My blog
It's not just the individual pixels which are made with polymers. It's the individual traces also. In fact, the whole field of polymer semiconducters is starting to ripen and bear fruit. The sheets of plastic they print won't only have light emitting portions, it can include power traces and even decoding logic! There might be a copper ribbon cable to connect the entire display to whatever external source provides data and power. But the entire display will be made from polymers.
This really is amazing technology. The circuitry is basically printed out using ink jet style heads. Actually, one of the article says that it actually plots the traces out ala a good old fasioned plotter as opposed to line-by-line like a printer. It's not hard to imagine that this stuff will lead to a rebirth of the homebrew electronics hobbyist. Even if you couldn't afford to buy your own plotter, a prototyping shop which owned one should be able to produce custom circuits to your own design in an extremely fast and cheap manner. Imagine a semi-conductor Kinkos! Could be cool stuff.
We've got things made out of plastic, that could, someday be used to display images or text. With all the things plastics can do, imagine the possibilites for these lighted ones!
Though, personally, I always though putting directions on the condom's wrapper was sufficient.
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
Roadside bulletin board telling you to stop smoking... or letting you know where the next strip mall was... loglo, anyone? Maybe stephenson is a prophet :)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
It's just like out of Only Forward. Soon we could be walking down the street and the walls could be colour co-ordinating with our clothes as we walk by. That would be so cool.
a technical overview
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
Does this strike anyone else as a Red Planet type thing, or am I thinking of the wrong movie? I know it was Mars and I think it was the Val Kilmer movie. I remember them being able to pull out a floppy looking screen that overlaid the landscape and was supposedly fed from the last data they got from their (defunct) orbiting craft ...
Many of the ideas mentioned here require optics to work properly.
My first quibble is that nothing in the article suggests that this display is transparent. Most of the posts here assume plastic = transparent. Not necessarily.
Secondly, the optics are always going to be a problem, until we have some form of holographic display.
For example, a HUD is only useful if it's focused well out ahead of you - near infinity - and the ONLY way to do this is with substantial, and large, optics. I've BUILT a HUD before - I know what I'm talking about. A transparent display simply won't do any good for you. And to do a DECENT HUD, you have to have a very bright display - able to be seen in bright daylight, brighter than the background material. Finally, the optics of the primary lens MUST be as large as the viewable area - because the rays are parallel to appear focused at infinity, the width/height of the area where your eyes can see the image is exactly the same as the size of the lens. So you can see that a cheap display won't help a lot, and a transparent display is pointless.
Also, a wearable display is a neat idea - but only if you focus it so your eyes can see it. Again, the transparency is no good if it's too close for your eyes to focus. Take a photographic slide, for example, and mount it three inches from your eye. Should be great, right? Super high resolution, bright clear colors, transparent... NOPE. You can't even see the image; it's just a dark blur obscuring your vision. You MUST have some optics to focus the image where your eye can focus on it.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
If you could make color / style changing cloths from this?
... Chix could flash their breasts when that "special someone" was checking them out !
of course, the next question; could you make it transparent
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
If IBM comes out with a computer with a roll-up display in or around 2025, I think they should call it the IBM AXE.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
Get real. Aside from the power cord, *MY* TV has two conductors for input. Okay, I'll give you a hint. It's called RF. Not good enough? What about ethernet, 8 pins. Want true video instead of digital data? How about the 15 or so pins on a VGA display? If the decoding electronics are embedded, you don't need lots of connectors.
If you can afford the millions of transistors for the display electronics, you can afford a million more for the decoding too.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Most of the posts here assume plastic = transparent. Yeah, that would be nice. But it's not necessarily the case here. Nothing in the article suggests that this display is transparent.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Wonder if anybody has solved putting a touch panel over the screen? If they could make one with sufficiently high resolution then you'd have quite the system.
The roll up screens they had in Red Planet were great. Well, that and AIMEE. (and Ms. Moss)
Invalid Checksum. Retrying.
A number of the comments here about advertising and the proliferation of displays reminded me of Minority Report. Everywhere the characters went were advertising displays - wrapped around the walls of stores and malls, moving billboards, even animated cereal boxes (John Anderton angrily tosses one aside after being bothered by the distraction at one point). Obviously Spielberg has the same vision of the future as many of you.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
Anyone agree?
Technoli
Ah, crap. I pulled that link out of my bookmarks, and it's out of date now. For the datasheet, go here: http://www.onsemi.com/pub/Collateral/MC33441-D.PDF
I want to be able to go into a store and say 'I'd like a screen 120" wide by 67" tall', and have them print it for me there on the spot, laminate it together, then just sell me a little re-usable "connection" module that clips on the edge of the screen to power/activate it.
If you want a different size screen, you just toss out the old one, keep the module and get a new one printed up.
And it's starting to sound very, very possible...
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
The issue isn't signal delivery, it's pixel addressing. To get the right charges to the right place for production of the image.
CRT's (TV's and Monitors) fire a magnetically redirected electron beam for its addressing. This makes it a very analoque device when you break it down, albeit a very high precission one.
LCD's are addressed via a crosshatch scheme and do have actual pixels for a change.
Unless that crosshatch or something similar can be reproduced, then yes it will take a high wire:pixel ration to get the job done.
Any spoon would be too big.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/f lat_speakers010418.html
They've been working on them for a while now.
It'll be really interesting when they manage to bundle the paper thin speakers, the paper thin monitor, embedded solar cells, and wireless networking all together into a single paper-thin sheet. Then you basically have a multimedia device that you can take and hang just about anywhere. And you thought telephone poles in the major cities were bad now... Just wait till they all play slide shows and video footage of someone's missing animal while playing sad music to tug on your heartstrings, beamed from said person's house nearby...
I've read a number of articles on these and other flat, flexible displays such as "digital paper". It's amusing that all of this life-changing display technology is just months from everyday use... and has been for the past six or seven years.
Paired a 17 inch one of these, the oQo computer mentioned yesterday may be a good deal cooler.
The technology stems from the discovery in 1989 of the compound p-phenylenevinylene which glows greeny-yellow when given an electric charge.
...
A little tweaking over the following decade produced compounds to emit blue and red light: the roll-up TV was born.
Makes sense to focus on those specific wavelengths.
With the flick of a switch the display could convert to infra-red
I know you can't mix RGB to get infra-red.
Is this LEP Vapourware?
-... ---
Imagine seeing a cityscape where every inch of every skyscraper is a billboard.
Haven't been to Tokyo have you?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
roll-up stuff is fine and good until you have to carry something around -- i believe a very important aspect of this technology is its portability. however, if i decided to carry my 42" roll up screen around (say, on a road trip), it would still not fit into my briefcase because when it's rolled up it will be a large tube around 30 inches long.
however, if such technology can be made so that the material can be folded (like paper) and does not cause distortions of the pixels at the edges of where i fold -- i am all for it. fine, everywhere i look there will probabbly be billboards because of this technology. but then, i can carry around my own and display stuff i want to see instead.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I'd love to have something like that .
Play video clips, etc.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Use row+column pins for the whole screen.
Or, perhaps use row+column pins for a 1/64 section of the screen combined with 6 pins for selecting which 1/64 of the screen region you want to use.
I did a lay report on this subject a few years ago for a university project. Have a read; I wrote it with a view to be easily digestible for the general masses :)
w illiamson/index.html
http://www.chemsoc.org/exemplarchem/entries/2001/
You will need a Chime plugin for viewing the 3D molecules.
http://www.mdlchime.com/chime/
regards,
Mark
" do have actual pixels for a change."
What? CRTs don't? Let's tell all the manufacturers to remove that shadow mask and those stupid stripes of phosphors, (which give you sub-pixel rendering for free) they don't need em!
"War makes me sad." - Me
I'd love to buy a roll of TV, change the channel to WB, and then use it as TP.
Who knows? that could displace Nielson ratings!
http://www.e4engineering.com/item.asp?id=45870&typ e=news
Cool light emitting screen things? Think of the wonder watches (and prOn)!
UWB? Think of the wonder watches (and prOn)!
Super batteries? Think of the wonder watches (and prOn)!
- Dregs
Why would I want a roll-up TV screen? Ever since I moved my 4 computers out of my living room and into the second bedroom, my living room has appeared empty. Now I'm supposed to roll-up my TV when I'm done watching? Maybe if it's on remote control, but otherwise, forget it. I like it the way it is.
I like the "Maps in the field" kinda thing, though. Kinda like Red Planet.
It's kinda cool watching some things from Sci-Fi come to reality. I just wish they'd get working on the damn holodeck. Talk about the ultimate in addictions. I'd never leave.
Is the power consumption of this technology low enough that eInk and the other related efforts will be obsolete even before they are commercially released?
Change the appearance of large items at will - make your house 'look' scary on Halloween, Waving flags and fireworks on the 4th. Give your house a stone wall, garden, or 'trees'. Make your house 'transparent' or 'invisible' for parties, exhibitionism or to get 'away'! (Screens on both inside and coutside of course.) Change 'wallpaper' at whim, decorate by era, place, or fetish. Make your apartment look like its huge! Play a 'real' game of quake, or nethack!
Your car could be a different color every day, or adapt 'styling features' (camo trucks for hunters or the army) 'fake' turbo for all the Rice-Boys out there.
Put 'windows' to the outside world or made up world in your office or cube. Your 'desktop' could be your desktop! Video conferencing could be far more personal, and body language would become useful.
A VR Holodeck of sorts could be be possible, embed into all surfaces in a room.
One *real book - any book contained within!
Graffitti could become an accepted artform. Leave it there a week and then *poof*
Learn to dance with the 'magic' footprints appearing at the proper times and positions.
The Hoover dam could be the biggest theater in the world!
Of course, by the time this comes to pass, the **AAs will probably have legislated that a user cannot view these screens without pervasive advertising. The Hoover dam will play McDonalds and Disney commercials 7 out of 8 hours, some 'Avatar' will follow you around offering product suggestions every two minutes, and someone will get pissed at you for something and hack your house, car and t-shirt to show goatse.cx at random intervals.
Don't want to think about that on the Hoover dam
if this technology can be made fine grained enough you could certialy put it inside wraparound shades. That would give you 3d VR glasses with periphreal vision. Not nearly as sophisticated as the ones in Wild Palms, but damn close. Periphreal vision is the key to convincing VR. I'm suprised nobody has tried something like that outside of creating a "Cave" environment.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Now you can stick a large display on the ceiling, for that simulated mirror on the ceiling effect with the porno actress/actor of your choice! (not responsible for emotional damages in the event Ron Jeremy appears upon your ceiling)
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Ya.. like commercial use will be first... lets try porn... porn is going to get the first distributions. porn made the internet.. oh wait.. thats either Cmdr Taco or Al Gore.
>A 1024 X 768 will require atleast 786,433 electical
:P
>contections, and wires made of metal. I expect
>serious problems with metal-fatigue induced
>conductor fractures, for roll-up displays.
Ever heard of nanotubes?
OK, so nanotubes can't be produced in consistent batches today -- but, assuming that's not fixed in the next couple months, there are plenty of non-brittle conductive options... the usual solution at large scale is a metal-plastic alloy, and I'm sure that the boys who came up with the screens can come up with a power solution
Okay... imagine walking into a house or building where every squaare inch of ceiling, floor, and wall was covered in this stuff -- put some sort of display on it like one of the more funky visualizations for winamp and you can't tell me that simply being inside such a place wouldn't be a most interesting sensation. :)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Maybe someone will FINALLY build a decent ebook reader with this tech. OF course it will probably use proprietary software and have DRM gargargar like all the rest of them, but this would be great for an ebook reader.
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
It would be possible except that each layer's transparency would have to be near 100% accurate. If there is any light diffusion, then the "backward" pixels in the z axis would become fuzzy and unclear after shining through so many layers. I assume you were implying a cube of plastic, maybe 1024x1024 with 1024 layers? The most backward pixels would have to go through 1024 layers unscathed! And still be clear enough to not overlap any of the other pixels just fractions of a millimeter away! Good luck either way I suppose.
--"You are your own God"--
End result: advertising is about to get a lot more annoying.
If you thought gratuitous Flash animations on the Web were obnoxious, you just wait until the marketing industry sees what they can do with these things.
I mean, forget about blink tags. We'll be able to blink the side of an entire public bus.
I could see a time when you no longer buy a book, magazine or newspaper, but instead buy(or download) a data cartride which is then inserted into your electronic reading device. The reading device would consist of a couple of pages of this stuff, something to read the data and some sort of navigation system(flip to page XXX, next page,...). You could possibly even integrate the ability to write on this electronic pad so that you could save you comments, highlight and other such things.
You could even have different, convieneint sizes. Novel size, newspaper size, magazine size and possibly texbook size.
That would be pretty cool...
YT is ready for this sh*t!!
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
"seized on?" Bless you?
I make these: http://beatseqr.com
LCD's are addressed via a crosshatch scheme and do have actual pixels for a change.
Internally? Yes. Externally? DVI and VGA inputs with ~20 wires, providing the pixel data in essentially serial fashion. The LCD's internals convert the stream to crosshatch signals. So no, you do not need thousands of wires.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Teletubbies!!!
My God, has our society come to this? Teletubbies as the dawn of a new age; LaLa, the technological Jesus.
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
This technology makes me think of a mid-90's show that was on Fox for a while: Tech-Factor, or Sy-Tech, or something like that? It was very cyberpunk.
People's "laptops" were cylinders about he diameter of a soda can, and about a "keyboard" wide. They unrolled the screen one side of the tube and the keyboard from the other. When they "folded it up" it made a sound like you were raising those pull-and-let-go blinds. That would be cool!
If Slashdot is where the spelling-challenged go when they die, I'm in heaven.
Interesting points. This might lead to an greatly expanded adoption of solar cells to power these, which in turn would drive the cost of the cells down and efficiency up...
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
What a cracker target that would be for defacing.
Or for stealing. There isn't much use for the LED scrolling banner thingies at home, nor is stealing one of the jumbotron type things in Times Square an option. However, if they have these things everywhere, small poster-sized ones would work nice as a TV at home and wouldn't last too long on the streets.
I'd say that for a billboard, they will use smaller polymer displays which will be cheaper to make than one mondo 24'x32' display. Say 48 -4'x4' screens. Now, there's a tempting target- you might not have much use for a 24'x32' screen, but all those smaller screens, think what you could do with them?
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
"Weave this bad boy into a full body suit..."
TELETUBBIES!
Plastics aren't known for standing up well to sunlight for extended periods--I wonder how this stuff will do.
Please have some respect.
One could use this ultra thin things as wallpaper for a room. The first version of a startrek-like holodeck.
Now you go and take this stuff and combine it with the See-Through, Paper-Thin Speakers and you've got your media where ever you go.
Just makes me wonder how long it's going to be until movies are made from a central perspective, like IMAX in your home.
At the very least it should be a cheaper method for bringing those remaining 34,940 movie theatres into the digital age
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
isn't this old news?
I'd swear that I saw an article in 1998 about flexible lcds by Xerox. As a matter of fact they had a rollup thing, and IIRC were displaying a newspaper.
Anyone see Red Planet? (I actually don't think anyone did; it wasn't tooo bad).
I have never heard this term 'crosshatch' in talking about LCDs. What does it mean? Do you mean multiplexed?
There are some pretty amazing chips inside a LCD monitor that drive the transistors on the glass, they're called gate drivers. These are bare silicon dies with microscopic pins on them that are bonded to the flexible lead that goes to the glass. Little metal balls provide the roughly 600 connections per IC that go to the glass. The signals swing from 0 to 40V in a non-linear fashion, the gate driver is essentially ~400 D/A converters that are latched in serially. That's right, an analog signal is where the rubber hits the road in a LCD.
There are lots of gate drivers around the glass, and the other chip is the source driver. These are less complex and are just a demultiplexer with drive to the right row.
CDT (Cambridge Display Technology) was touting LEPs as the next LED that is capable of high refresh rates and the ability to see from angles, all because the technology doesn't use a backlight but instead the plastic itself emits light.
Among some of the other advantages I remember highlighted was the ability to create strange pixel configurations, low power usage, and a relatively inexpensive manufacturing process.
We'll have to see what promises it will live up to...
Semiconducting Polymers on Display
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Great. Now there will be a two-step process for going to war with the United States:
Step 1: Blow up the Army's "map satellites".
Step 2: Attack while 50,000 US soldiers get lost in the desert holding a useless piece of translucent polymer.
If the satellite TV goes on the fritz, not a big deal. If 50 US soldiers die because some platoon leader couldn't get artillery coordinates off his "broken" map, well that's a bit of a problem, eh?
I have never heard this term 'crosshatch' in talking about LCDs. What does it mean?
Ya got me. My point was that display devices are all driven from external sources by a relatively few signal wires. The internal workings of LCDs really aren't important, so I assumed the other fella was right about that for the sake of argument.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
The BBC's Radio channel 'Radio 4' featured CDT in their 'Material World' programme on 11 July. It can be heard here using a Real Audio player. The web-page summarising this transmission is here.
CDT won the 2002 MacRobert award for innovation in engineering for this technology. Details here.
Polymer or otherwise, light-emission sure is a nice feature for a display :-)
No sig to see here. Move along.
for the pr0n industry!
You want to enhance your appearance? You want to "advertise" when out for a night on the town? Why bother with transparent flaps, when you can just put your favourite pr0n star's anatomy in just the right place to catch that cute girl or guy's eye!
These screens are very sensitive to water and currently *have* to be shielded behind glass. So all this talk of roll-up screens is premature.
One could make animated cereal box ala Minority Report
Video rentals could have a video preview on the box in the store ...
Reprogrammable banners
Looks like LCD is going the way of the dodo bird.
m.mmm..myyy
How can no one mention the OLED TOLED and FOLED! Essentially what we are talking about here are those technoligies but possibly for proprietry reasons they have resorted to other names
Kodak
FOLED
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
i have enough mixups cracking my head on a really clean window becuase i didn't see it, hopefully this stuff is durable enough to hold up (against my head)
The infra-red that they are talking about is merely a representation in visible wavelengths. Even if it did manage to output IR from RGB signals, it wouldn't be much use. You don't really imagine that people can ACTUALLY see infra-red do you? (or ultra-violet, for that matter)
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
offtopic? I object! man. I was talking about what i could use the new technology for. That is pretty much centered around the foldy screen - the topic of the article. Twat moderators.
Mod me down, fine with me, it's my real karma I try to keep up.
Uhmm.... Okay... so you have to put it behind something water-tight. That shouldn't _HAVE_ to be glass, should it? I would expect anything waterproof would do. Why couldn't they coat it in something like laminate plastic? (Or some other water-tight and flexible substance)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Wearable screens means one thing,
We Could All Look Like Teletubbies!!
gack...