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New LCD Flatscreen Concept: A Wedge of Plastic
SimianOverlord writes "The Register reports on an innovation in the field of flat panel LCD screens that promises cheaper screens with the same quality using existing manufacturing technology. A Flat Projection Display is created by bouncing light into a thin wedge of plastic from the bottom of the screen, at just the correct angle to allow the rebounded light to escape at the correct pixel. "We have to play around with the image to make sure that the pixels don't bunch up" explained Prof. Travis, the inventor. "If you don't do that the image can appear a little like an image reflected off water" The new technology has already attracted interest from a major TV maker, but don't expect them in your laptop until projector minaturization catches up."
I wonder if this could work with HUD or for display injection into a pair of glasses? That would be neat - to have the image in your glasses / windscreen!
***You learn something Every day. And then you die.***
Anyone else picturing all their pixels sliding down to the corner of the screen in a pink mess..?
Eventually then you'd be able to put these at the bottom of you window to use it as a tv then?
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
The video on their website is crap. Don't try it...
this will triple the price of the hardware, instead of lowering it. right?
will regular lcd prices slide down?
will it tell me when my toast is done? (sorry, no breakfast yet...)
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If I had a dime for every new display technology (or other kind of cool technologies) that gets in the papers, I could go to the same clubs of Warren Buffet. But if I had it for the technologies that actually reach me as a consumer, I could barely buy a film ticket, depending on city.
I don't know exactly why it is but it's a fact. I'm thinking of making a list. It may make for funny reading ten years from now.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
You might call this a prism. The concept of bouncing light off of the inside edge of a prism is what happens in the pentaprism mirror inside a slr camera.
The big advantage that I can see with this is that a reasonable quality plastic wedge/prism should be much cheaper to replace when it gets damaged. I'm sure the initial cost will still be high, but the expensive stuff can be a little more protected.
eric
Ultimately that is the real brass ring, because there are a whole lot more people that can't afford the new technology, than can. Especially when considered on a global scale. Bottom line: I don't think we're going to be hearing about the 'death' of tube-based televisions for many years to come...
---As my daddy used to tell me: "You gotta be smart before you can be a smartass."
Cheap silicon wins again -- it's been supplanting copper, now optics.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
If projection tech needs to catch up so we can use this in a TV or laptop, it'll have to catch up even more to allow it to be used in glasses. But a bigger problem is that the light exits the wedge vertically (or horizontally, if the wedge is sideways), so the diffusing coating they use to make it visible in front or behind would affect transparency.
Paul "Say no to feeping creaturism"
A prominent female fashion guru has just announced his new master piece, a dress made with 'Flat Projection Display' as it's only fabric.
"With it, ladies all over may customise their clothing with any pattern or picture they want", beamed the millionaire dressmaker.
However, he declined comment on what would happen to the otherwise transparent dress after it's power supply, rated for 23 minutes of use, failed.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
why not make screens with no dead or stuck pixels? It's a huge pain in the ass to repack the new screen and bring it back to the store because ONE pixel is not working properly.
And manufacturers, here's a clue for your QC people: there is no such thing as "acceptable amount of defective pixels". I don't care if they're not touching or not, if they work above 30 degrees Celsius or when submerged in KY jelly. If I'm buying a new car there are no dents or scratches on it, so why should your screens be any different?
First thing that came to mind was the film Brazil and the tiny CRTs with big lenses.
Pretty clever.
One way to acheive is mirror array at 'base' ala DLP. DOn't know if this is the approach, but if so, corrections for each pixel would be pretty easy to handle in firmware.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Personal air travel!
Take off anywhere, land anywhere. Fast, secure, simple.
Just wait until airplane miniaturization catches up.
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia
It sounds as if these folks think they know how to manufacture these displays, but have not actually done so yet. I predict they will discover that injection molding cannot create the large optically flat surfaces they need to create an undistorted image. Differences in the solidification time across the wedge will distort the shape of the surfaces and distort the images. Any differences in the temperature across the injected flow of resin will create internal ripples in the wedge. I also wonder if they have a way of controlling thermal distortions during use where the back of the wedge is warmer than the front and thus causes the wedge to curl.
Invention is easy. Manufacturing in high quantity, high quality, low price is the actual hard part. And undercutting the deflating price-performance curve of other well-established competing technologies is even harder. That said, I do wish them luck.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I read on MSNBC this wedge technology will only work on Windows. Manufacturers are refusing to provide drivers for Linux because of its inferior API and obselete filesystem. It has also been reported that Linux users frequently hold meetings where goats are used in a way that the Bible frowns upon.
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Thanks,
Bart
They have developed an ill fitting sawtoothed double paned glass window that pushes more light further into the room, and less hits the area directly below the window, making offices lighter.
/angles were such that you got a perfect image.
This is basically doing the same but replacing light with a projector source.
Imagine a specially moulded radially displaced set of panes, that had a central gun firing at them in a 180 arc, and the timing
Make sense?
the viewing angle would have to be compensated a bit...
Check new scientist for the story on lighter windows.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
The "dress" had the panes on certain strategic locations if you know what I mean. The controller was setup in such a way that the panes were opaque most of the time but now and they would flash very fast transparent.
The trick of course being that your brain requires time to see things. Especially when you are not trying to look like a complete pervert. You clearly saw the thing become transparent but at least I was to slow to see anything.
So in one way the girl was nude. But because you couldn't actually see anything she wasn't.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
http://www.io2technology.com/dojo/178/v.jsp Free Space Display, Project the Images into the Air... No need for bulky Screens... Think it will work?
Yeah and some ass will kill somebody on the road because he was watching a movie while driving his car.
Can they run on methane? I'd gladly welcome any sort of device that runs longer when I fart on it.
Are you sure? This guy is my maths professor, it sounds like he's been working on it longer than you - and he has it working!
The idea may be simple (even I thought of it when I was about 13) but there are problems to be overcome, such as the pixels bunching due to the rays coming out at different angles, and black spaces between pixels due to the same problem. (Both overcome using a screen placed at a critical distance) He's also written completely new raytracing software (as you'd know if you'd read the website/attended his lectures) as standard raytracers model total internal reflection as a reflection off of a metal surface - which is not accurate for these purposes.
A quote (probably from star trek -- i forget): "History is written by the victors"
But, back on topic, I did see (what I assume was) an earlier prototype of this last year on an Open Day. From what I saw of it, the picture was quite good, however it had the same shortcomings as any other image produced by a projector - it wasn't that bright. So people who say this will not replace CRTs are probably right, but this isn't really its intended market.
This is designed for people who want a home cinema but don't have the money for expensive plasma, and don't want the hassle of having a projector that people can walk in front of. These people don't mind that they have to watch a film in the dark - they already do. It gives them a large picture without needing a deep room to allow the image to be projected and with a total cost probably of not much more than the original screen and projector.
In reality, this is more of an innovation in screen design, with silicon to stop the distortion, rather than an advance in projector technology. But, I, for one, welcome our new projection screen overlords.
They want $9,000 up front ($18,600 total) for a 15" "screen".
A Maths Professor? Did you mean Mathematics? Certainly math would enter into the equation. But I would think someone specializing in the physics of optics would be a better start. But that is not important. Say for instance, you take a buttload(technical term) of fiber optic elements and fuse them in a sequemce at one end, then move them up a surface(call it a screen) at intervals allowing each fiber to be a "pixel" on the "screen". Then you "shine" red, blue and green lasers into the base fibers(which are ordered to correspond with placement on the "screen" to enable a picture to form. Then further suppose that you designed a control program to coordinate the color display based upon video information. you can grab a bunch of fiber optic strands and do this yourself, using your garden variety of light to see how this could work. Using computer generated bending techniques, you could position the fibers into a screen usable as a display. It would be relatively heavy, but "solid state" stuff like this would be. Pump the colored laser impulses into the base of the device and you would have a "LightBrite" that was actually useful.
This would eliminate "pixel bunching". Controlling the thickness of the fibers would control the resolution of the display. Displays could even be "grown" from a substrate using current 3-d modeling.
From the article, it sounds like they correct for this in software. You'd need to calibrate the firmware specially for each new display, but it's doable and can be automated
I hope so, but don't see how it can work. The problem is getting a seamless image between the part of the image that bounces N times inside the wedge before exting versus the one that bounces N+1 times. The upper edge of the light that bounces N times inside the wedge before exiting to the screen must magically fall adjacent to the lower edge of the band of light that bounces N+1 times before exiting. Nonflat surfaces cause divergence of these beams and lead to either gaps across the image or overlapping scan lines. Although one could resample/render the image to handle overlapping scanlines, the image would be unavoidably fuzzy in the overlap region. Worse, thermal distortion and aging of the plastic wedge means that the "calibration" would be time-varying.
The point is that the gap-inducing distortion is in the physics of the optical system. Without a projector that controls the direction of the beam from each pixel (not just the intensity of the beam), the system is in trouble. To my knowledge, they don't have a projector with calibrated beam steering.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
my apologies - i meant maths lecturer. He's actually part of the Photonics and Sensors group. I should have remembered one of his favorite sayings when posing before: "I am not a mathematician!"
I read a funny review of the Z88 a long time ago. The Z88 had a small LCD display "bought from the Japanese", but that was the result of an epic battle inside Sinclair. Clive Sinclair himself was quoted as saying "LCD's are rubbish, we have the only real portable display technology". This was based on the Sinclair pocket TV, which bent electron beams through 90 degrees with a big magnet. The journalist writing the review said that he saw a demonstration and "you placed your chin on a rest, and saw a ghostly green four lines of twenty characters floating in the infinite distance."
There was a memorable conversation with Alan Sugar who bought the Sinclair
Reviewer: Do you have the rights to the Pandora display?
AS: We have the rights to all the Sinclair patents
R: Do you plan any products based on Pandora?
AS: Have you seen it?
R: Yes.
AS: Well then.
Oddly, no Pandora based products were ever produced.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Maybe they forgot that they've got the "melting screen" screensaver on their computer.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
Why is this being reported as new? I first heard about it more than two years ago (may have been more like three years).
my girlfriend used that word lastnite in bed.
http://theapplecollection.com/design/macdesign/poc ketprojector.html
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
CRT alignment is still adjusted by a human.
Must be why Samsung makes CRTs with onboard magnetic alignment systems (rudimentary GPS aqs it were) that don't require realignment based on hemisphere...
Injection molding does not require human intervention.
I've got 30 injection mold machines lined up and working just outside my office, and the amount of human intervention required to keep them producing error free products keeps several staff busy making adjustements, to everything from the pvc recipe to contamination control.
glasses with a reflecting prism allowing a low powered laser to project the image directly onto your retina.
This page attributes it to Winston Churchill.
I could have sworn that I read an excerpt from a document related to Hitler's orders to invade Poland that used the phrase (or, rather, the history book's translator chose to translate it that way). It would be ironic if the Nazis had quoted the British politician in ordering the actions that eventually brought Churchill to power. It would have been sort of like reading from a cursed scroll for the Nazis.
In Korea only old people correct thier own spelling.