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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."
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?
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"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)?
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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.
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Sorry, no. Well, it depends how good of camo you're talking about. What I'd like to believe is that technology like this can create a true "stealth suit" which creates a duplicate image of whatever's on the other side, effectively making the wearer invisible. But keep in mind, this is still a 2D display and you can't project a different image to viewers at different viewing angles. Not yet, anyway. Maybe eventually. The other big obstacle to this approach (microcameras, etc.) is that the shape of the suit would change as the wearer moves. So you need unprecedentedly high-res, low-latency motion tracking for every point on the wearer's body.
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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.
The main problem with this is that you would have to blend in from all angles....
If you were just worried about the frontal side or if you were in a very repeating field of grass or something similarly "bland" then there would be greater effect. Probably would be better than regular camo.
But a man standing up in clearing is just as likely to be seen if he is projecting his own background as if he were wearing camo.
And lets not forget shadows....
Now if you wanted to have camo that would determine a good set of colors to be based on the surrounding average colors... THAT is probably easy and probably even better than trying to project the exact image of what is around you.
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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. : )
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Metal? Metal you say?
Conductive Polymers should solve that whole problem pretty well.
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
And with a GPS card and some topographic maps... voila! A hiker's (or forester's, or geologist's, etc.) wet dream. Add some software to render the map in 3-D and do cross-sections and you would have one extremely useful product.
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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.
Why go through the extra expense and trouble of having 100 pages of channels when you could just have one page and change channels by pressing a button?
Umm...NO....
Adaptive camouflage needs to change the spectrum of light *reflected* from the object being concealed. An emissive display such as this one wouldn't work so good in say...the dark! (Unless you want to light up so they know where to point the guns...)
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?
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The original logic should be 2359296 connections, one each for RGB and 1024x768.
A little more on this subject...
If you use scanlines, you could get away with a single wire carrying a signal (or a signal and power if power is being distributed over the same wire) and decode the signal at each pixel and distribute power (for intensities) at the contact point into the RGB plastics. That would reduce your calculation down to... 1792 connections (x+y) since some decoding is happening at the contact points.
The disadvantage is you'd need decoder logic for every pixel, but this may be easier and more producable than individual wires. If the decoders were good enough, you could reduce the wires further by having 4 pixels decoded for each wire (providing the wire meets at a single contact point for the four pixels. A four pixel connection point without scanlines reduces the number of wires to 196608 for continuous updates (such as the original example) and with scanlines you halve the values in each direction ending with 896 wires (512+384).
Fast scan conversion with long "burn" times would likely not be noticable (update takes a fraction of the "on screen" time - probably less noticable than a TV), and if some memory is available for each pixel and a clock is used, one could double buffer the display, and have a near 0 update time.
I'm sure there are other possibilities. My main point is that wiring isn't the only option for each pixel or pixel component (RG or B), as long as there is enough space to stick in a small amount of circuitry to do some decoding at the end.
Not neccessarily... if you can buy them at $20 for a pack of ten, would a short lifespan matter that much? As long as the lifespan wasn't inconveniently short, the cost may mitigate those problems. Not to mention, if they do die of faster than CRT's, producers may be more interested in making them, knowing that you'll be replacing them (and paying the manufacturers) more often.
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