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."
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.
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
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.
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