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Polymer Vision Produces 5" Rollable Displays
drquizas writes "Polymer Vision (associated with Philips) has produced a rollable display using organic electronic techniques. The display, currently measuring 5" diagonal and capable of displaying QVGA at 320x240, will eventually be targeted towards applications such as military uses (maps anyone?), newspapers and e-books."
Cool.
Look like they might have come up with something to satisfy people like me. I love the idea of electronic books; but I'd miss being able to turn the page. Plus, if the electronic ink is as readable as they say, no worries about eyestrain.
This sounds like it's a bit small for the need to be rolled up. It happens to be the same resolution as the Pocket PC I'm coding for at my job, and it is rather small. I guess perhaps this could be merely a proof of concept to show they can do something like this, while they work on making something bigger.
With this on my walls and those window LCD's I can finally live my dream of never leaving my parents' basement!
"Whats that you have on you desk? This is an exam young man!"
"Oh Just a sheet of paper and a calculator teacher"
It's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them..
At least if you've got the paper kind you don't have to worry about it crashing, breaking, running out of power, etc. And with the paper kind, you can easily mark way points, targets, etc in seconds - doing that with a software-based system won't be half as fast.
I can't imagine a field commander taking along one of these without wanting a paper map as a backup. The last thing you want to do in a combat zone is be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
That is all I need, being able to check the latest newspaper only to find SPAM and ads. I've seen it happen to the Internet in general, to AVantGo, even to MobiPocket (thankfully not as much). I do truly hope this works out as it seems like it would be pretty cool. I'm thinking those REWARD FOR LOST DOG posters could be VERY interesting ;)
Much like many newspapers. And we know how poor they are at displaying information.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
from the article: ...
Further, "the life of our organic electronics displays has been already prolonged from "hours to months," he added.
Actually, the production line they have built can only produce 5000 units per year. As they say, this is more than research, but less than commercial production. Also, this unit only produces black, white, and 4 types of gray. So don't expect to be able to take your pr0n with you on the road just yet in electric, rollable form.
Imagine having one of these displays with a little USB hookup, a couple of page turning buttons, and nothing else. If the price drops enough, newspapers could sell them to customers along with a subscription service that allows them to download the morning's paper before they head off to work. No more recycling, no more ink-stained fingers...
I realize this is already sort of possible with laptops/pda's, etc.. but there's something comforting about a convenient rolled up paper on the bus ride in. Plus it can be used to swat pesky mosquitos!
This is pretty cool, but the picture that shows up on the display has to be generated from some data source or CPU-carrying device. If you plug in your rollable display to a laptop/PDA, it isn't nearly as cool.
Alternatively, the screen could just store one image permanently. In which case it would be just expensive, unreliable paper.
That being said, I am all for the technology. When they can make a transparent sticker that can be turned on as a TV/monitor, I would buy one. Forget flatscreen, your TV would just be a sheet of glass on a stand. That would be cool.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
I could swear I saw an article on a similar product recently, but the company was working on both rollable displays and paint on screens to use as customizeable wall paper (hmm...I'm in a mauve flower mood today...). trying to find the link but it was a few weeks ago and it was one of those middle-of-the-night, can't-sleep, random walks through the internet.
Whee signature.
This is good news for paper reduction. I suppose it is also good news for squirrels and other tree loving animals...
From the article:
Further, "the life of our organic electronics displays has been already prolonged from ?hours to months," [Bas van Rens, general manager at Polymer Vision] added.
I'm trying to figure this one out... is he saying that this cool roll-up display, with four shades of grey and readable as paper, will self destruct after a few months?
And they're so hard to produce, that he can only make 5000 a year? Just to have ten engineers running the line at $100k/yr (or one executive at $1m/yr) would make each one cost $500 bucks.
No wonder he's targeting the military. Nobody else can afford to spend $500-$1000 on displays that don't last much longer than a gallon of milk in a wet paper sack. But I can envision plenty of 100% valid military applications -- after all, if you're going to blow up a million-dollar cruise missile, why not give it a thousand-dollar configuration panel?
Ideally, of course, the military money helps get the screen into the production levels required for the consumer market. Extend the lifespan to six months and drop the cost to under $60 bucks, and people will pay $10/month for disposable e-books.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
5" 320x240
10" 640x480
20" 1280x1024
5120" 327680x245760 - Almost enough for that 16 megapixel 360' panaramic shot I'm not working on.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I was just thinking of something (I know, scary isn't it). These things will probably be priced reasonably in a short period of time and as Phillips likely hopes will one day replace a good chunck of print media.
What about disposal? It is likely that if they are priced reasonably enough they may become just as disposable as newspaper (all right, not quite so bad) but even if only one in ten people disposed of these things after they became damaged (look how we treat our newspapers and tell me these things won't be piling up in the dump) how are we supposed to get rid of them? They likely contain a fair amount of material that is not decomposable within a reasonable amount of time. We already know that computers are adding quite a bulge to the normal waste, how would seveal million sheets of this stuff hold up (quite well I'm guessing, probably 100,000 - 500,000 years!)
This is of course only my perspective but it does give reason to pause.
This display tech would make a great wrist-wrapping PDA gauntlet. Rather than have to hand-hold the PDA/cellphone/MP3/video player beastie, an arm-conforming design would enable handsfree display. The only decision is whether to wear the display on the top of the forearm (risking damage to the display) or wearing it on the inside of the forearm (which seems a little less comfortable).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
A 2cm bend radius means that rolled up, this display will form a tube 4cm wide. This is NOT "roll-up into a pen", this is more "roll up into a scrollcase".
To put in another way: this is a 5 inch diagonal display - say 3x4 inches - that rolls up into a 2 inch wide tube. <sarcasm>Yes, that is a HUGE improvement.</sarcasm>
WHEN they get this to have a 1mm bending radius I'll get really excited. Until then this isn't all that great, although I suppose a 2 inch diameter by 3 inch long tube diameter tube full of battery and electronics, with a pull-out display might be somewhat useful.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I've wanted to build a custom portable computer into a staff/walking stick for a while. This would be perfect for the display. A 2 inch curve is about right to wrap around the top of a staff, particularly if it is widened to about a 5 inch circumference at the top.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
The next version of "AdIN" advertising....
For those who don't know, those ads in the bathrooms at your local universities...
I don't why, but I kind of imagine the phone from Earth Final Conflict in my head when I read this. Take a little G3 technology, built in cameras and these roll up screens and I think we have everything we need to build a working version.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Interesting to note what's current and what's in production...
Dimensions: display + pixels + aperture
Display size: 71 mm x 96 mm (diameter 119 mm).
Number of pixels: 240 x 320.
Optical aperture: 79%.
Driving: refresh rate, voltages, power consumption, volume electronics
Optimum refresh rate: 50 Hz.
Operating voltages: column voltage range: -15V, +15V; row voltage range: -25V, +25V; common electrode voltage range: 0, +5 V.
Power consumption: maximum power consumption of the display: 52 mW. Typical power consumption (10% duty cycle) of the display: 1 mW.
Contrast, reflectance, switching time, bi-stable, grey levels, colour
Contrast: 9:1.
White reflectance: 25%
Switching time: 800 ms.
Bi-stable
Number of grey levels: current: 2; in product: 4.
Colour: current 1; in future product: 1
Flexibility, thickness
Display thickness: current: 350 m; product: 100 m.
Display flexibility: current bending radius: 20 mm;
future product bending radius: 10 mm.
Stick facts: (user interface, bluetooth)
Component area of the addressing electronics: 48 cm2.
Height of the addressing electronics: 2 mm.
Typical size of a 0.5 Wh rechargeable Li-ion battery (10% duty cycle, 1 hour use per day): 1,3 cm3.
Battery life under the same conditions: approximately 1 month.
Bluetooth interface
A little planning goes a long way...
Much like many newspapers
ah, but how many newspapers are 5" in diameter?
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Firstly they are making it enough volumes to attract others to build applications that need it, but not enough to generate any real money...But have plans for mass manufacturing plant with 12 to 24 month period from now, but they are seeking funding to build it, which means they have to show SOMETHING, with future potential. They are doing active research, meanwhile which means that they can make it bigger, last longer ,cheaper, and have better resolution, they just don't know yet which of those are going to improve and how much in the period before mass production. The first generation product is probably usably mainly as prototype design and perhaps some rare cases, where cost is not such a problem...
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
Fujitsu have come out with a similar looking flexible display product.
It looks like we are going to get very light, very energy efficient displays, rsn. These might not be used in a flat form, but would be very useful in making hard cased laptops even lighter...or clipboard devices...its just amazing.
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Three other sources on this topic - worth looking at - UDC has a video of an early working green monochrome display: Universal Display Corporation (NJ) www.universaldisplay.com Cambridge Display Technology (UK) www.cdtltd.co.uk Society for Information Display www.sid.org
If they can move the circuitry of an active panel display from glass to flexible plastic, then they should be able to put the processor on the same flex material too. Back in 2002, they put a Z80 processor on glass. That Z80 had only 13,000 transistors and this roll-up display uses 85,000 so the feature count is not out of the question (the biggest hurdle is the transistor count for RAM).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
How about a bumper sticker you can change when you go home for the holidays, go to work, or have a cop trailing you for a possible speeding ticket. The "Evolve" stick ons are cool but just not practical for every situation.
BTW, "4 types of gray" usually includes both black and white. It does on the old Game Boy or on older Palm PDAs, anyway.
They also have an artist's impression of these screens, stating that "Future looks flexible".
Apparently the future is finally here.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
If you could get these things up to a lifespan of a decade, and get them in colour, you could panel a car with them.
You could also get by with pixels that are huge - say, 1 cm diameter, and still get some neat effects, like zebra stripes that move along the car in proportion to your speed.
A moving image on a moving object? Ergonomic nightmare -- that's dynamic camouflage. Guaranteed traffic accident. It'd be banned.
There's actually an article in the february Scientific American about organic displays, though it talks more about organic leds and not really electronic ink. Still, a pretty interesting read, which has been kindly been placed online at the Sci Am website here
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Cool, now you can fly over the battle field and reprogram the enemy's maps...
But the biggest thing that negates some of the disadvantages this display has is that it is inherently static state.
I hate when I do that.
KFG
The display, currently measuring 5" diagonal and capable of displaying QVGA at 320x240, will eventually be targeted towards applications such as military uses (maps anyone?)
A paper map with a bullet hole in it is still a map. You cannot say the same about an electronic device
make a total body suit out of these, and project a rear image forward... ok so it would only work in grey light conditions now, but we're getting there.
tcboo
...could be rolled up inside a pen...
...a bending radius of 2 cm.
That's a damn big pen.
Might it be possible to include electroplastics in the display substrate? Those materials are manufactured in one shape, returning to it after a mechanical deformation (eg. manual pulling). Additionally, a small applied charge deforms them into another "baked-in" shape; more advanced versions have manifold states, addressable by charge. How about a display that's prerolled into a scroll, then rolled again like a string into a disc, in its uncharged form? A 1" disc might snap into a 15" display on powerup, giving new meaning to "quarter VGA".
--
make install -not war
By 2005, the rollable displays, which can now be used to read e-mail, could initially be used in military applications as electronic, updatable maps on the battlefield, van Rens predicted. The monochrome display offers four gray levels.
Soldier 1: Where's the pickup point?
Soldier 2: Just a sec... SHIT!
Soldier 1: What?!?
Soldier 2: Got to reboot the map... got a grey screen of death!
<boom>
<splat>
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Everybody here seems to be missing the biggest advantage that these have for military uses - realtime display of deployments! Imagine a company lieutenant pulling one of these out of his pack and looking at it. It syncs via wifi to the HQ and he instantly can see where the nearest frienldly armoured unit is, the current target of his backup artillery, and where other units are and whether they are in a position to support him. If every unit carries a GPS unit that automagically radios their position back to HQ, then it would not be infeasible to preoduce data like this on the map.
Obviously, with such a system reliability is going to be the biggest issue. The biggest advantage of these screens then is that they keep there last image even if power is lost. Thus, if there are any problems with the wifi link or power supply, they're still useful as a basic map. The biggest issue then is reduced to durability (i.e. dirt, water, shocks). While admittedly a big issue, the technology has serious potential now.