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."

Comments

Welcome to the Diamond Age

[Myco]

No mass-market for these screens on clothing? Hmm. Show of hands, who has read Niel Stephenson's _The Diamond Age_, with its vision of a future immersed in nanotechnology, and especially in a pervasive atmosphere of ever-changing displays (mostly ads) on damn near every surface.

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.

Re:Roll up TV Screens? lets get serious

[spacefrog]

Metal? Metal you say?

Conductive Polymers should solve that whole problem pretty well.

Re:Multi-layer tv?

[cdrudge]

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?