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Stretching Crystals Promise Bendy, Full-Color Displays
NewScientist is reporting that a new approach to crystal formation could help create power-efficient, flexible color displays. These new photonic crystals, structured similar to opals, can be tuned by adjusting the gaps between the crystals. "The beauty of the device is that it can produce the whole spectrum of colors, even ultraviolet and infrared light, using only incident light. As a result, the expensive color filters used in every other color display on the market today, are no longer needed. And because the displays use only reflected ambient light, no power is wasted on back-lighting, as in today's mobile phones, for example. 'They can be viewed just as well in bright sunlight as in indoor light,' team member André Arsenault of the University of Toronto told New Scientist."
As usual, tell us when it has reached the market/got by the politicans/satisfy some patent/pleased some lawyers.
But I like the monitor being the only source of light in the room. How am I going to see the screen when I'm sitting like a mushroom in my dungeon/office with the lights off? This technology is a bummer.
Unless we could make suits/coverings out of it that would display a video feed of what's behind you: active camouflage!
I am the one true god. However, as an atheist, I don't believe in myself. I guess I have a self-esteem problem.
This story is worthless without pictures.
There are none here, although there's no shortage of sales brochure style summaries:
http://www.opalux.com/technologies.php
End of lesson. You may press the button.
The article says that if you can produce light of any frequency you don't need colour filters. But this can't be the case, because a computer display needs to mix different frequencies (to produce white light, for example). That said, if they can control the proportion of incident white light that is reflected as white rather than coloured to a single frequency (or narrow band of frequencies), and with a simple light/dark filter (such as a black and white liquid crystal display), it could make a display that works on hue-saturation-value rather than red-green-blue. That would be interesting for the computer world, which has used boring RGB values to store image data for so long. I know that JPEG stores chrominance and luminance separately but I'm not aware of any file format (let alone graphics hardware) which works using HSV.
(BTW, does anyone know how to post a comment to an article using the new discussion system?)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Who else looked at their Technologies page and saw:
Ela STINK
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
"The beauty of the device is that it can produce the whole spectrum of colors, even ultraviolet and infrared light"
Sweet, now we can get a virus on our computers that gives us sunburn.
I wonder if Hawaiian Tropic will hire me as a blackhat to ensure they get increased sales from computer users. Maybe they'll introduce me to the girls.
Click Reply on the grey bar with the slider. It's next to More and Prefs on the right side.
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them."
Marvin the Martian
except don't computer display all their colors by limiting any given spot to one frequency, and then altering the brightness of that spot. Specifically there are static spots for each pixel - one red, green and blue. Their frequencies remain, only their brightnesses change - and we get a lot of colors from them.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
I wonder if this would allow a soldier to use his laptop in the dead of night, viewing his screen via night-vision goggles? Anyone out there that's ever used night-vision goggles know if this even possible in the slightest?
That's stopping this from reaching my home, anyway? This is the fifth year running that I've heard of "bendable displays", etc. - and I've yet to see a commercial product.
Two infrared pixels == built-in Wiimote sensor bar!
Presumably the only reason that we have to use pixels, are because we didn't have any material (or any cost effective method of manipulating a meterial) that could produce colours of any desired frequency (until now). So they just used single coloured phosphors that could be adjusted to different brightnesses of a single colour, and when mixed with 2 other colours, can fool the eye into seeing any colour. If you can just set the colour directly, why bother using 3 separate colours to fake it instead.
which is totally what she said
1) What is the resolution of the device?
2) What is the power consumption of the device? While I can already see there's no energy wasted on unnecessary back-lighting, how long could such a display be run off of, for example, a typical rechargeable battery?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
From the product website (http://www.opalux.com/p-ink.php): ... ...
5. Sub-second switching speed.
So, it might be a while before this is useful for fast-changing displays, like TVs and computer displays.
Might be ok for picture frames, outdoor signage and stuff.
Which doesn't appear properly in IE6, btw.
My blog
From the company that is actually producing the technology, they list the technology as only having sub-second switching speed. That is not fast enough for monitors. Also, they only target the technology for large billboards or other outdoor displays, where the content is more static, and switching time might not be as critical.
...we all need to have calibrated room lighting in order to get the proper colors to show up. No blue with that 60w incandescent!
Which brings me to...how does this work with fluorescent lighting? If you're using partial reflectivity, human eyes get the proper fractions of the constituents of the phosphors. If you're using interferometry, wouldn't you end up with huge dropouts in the visible spectrum?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
After thinking about it more, I see what you mean. Black, white and greys aren't colours in the visual spectrum, rather white needs to be made from a mix of other colours, and black is the absence of colour.. so simply being able to set a colour isn't enough, you need to control the brightness and still need to be able to mix different frequencies. So if you didn't have some kind of filter then you'd have a pretty weird looking display. Should have known better than to think a low /. id'er needed me to explain things :P
which is totally what she said
These photonic crystals are being built into arrays of pixels, where each pixel can, effectively, control its reflection color. So, a pixel can set itself to 'black' by adjusting its reflection to be outside the visible range (in the IR or UV), or can set itself to 'red' by tuning itself to have a reflection in the red region of the spectrum. So each pixel can take on a continum of color values:
(Black), Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, (Black)
To generate a white reflection (or non-spectral colors, like brown), adjacent pixels would still have to do what we do in modern displays: one would be Red, the other Blue, the other Green, and your eye would see reflected white light. So in a certain sense it has the same pixel-clustering limitation of current displays.
However it's better than current displays in some ways. First of all, if your image happens to be monochromatic (or parts of the display are monochromatic) then you don't have to be using three display pixels for a single image pixel... so in essence you can triple your display resolution. No doubt if such displays become common, algorithms will be developed that allow the display to maximize resolution when possible.
Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the color range is greater. A typical display mixes Red, Green and Blue. But the wavelength of the Red, Green, and Blue that are available are inherently limited. This means that although the display can generate many colors, it doesn't actually cover the full color range of colors that your eye can see. With this proposed display, you can adjust the Red, Green, and Blue wavelengths themselves. This provides access to a wider color range. For instance, when this display sets itself to 'orange' it will be a pure spectral orange, rather than an approximation generated by mixing the right amount of red, green, and blue.
And, of course, an obvious advantage is that this system is reflection-mode. Like paper, it doesn't generate light, merely reflects ambient light. This makes it ideal for reading outdoors, in natural light, etc.
So unless you're in the digital billboard industry, there's still alot more than 2-4 years of work to be done before it matters - if ever.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
Is there anyone, anywhere on the web who ever tracks these technologies that are supposed to 'make it to the market soon'? I mean how about it. A site that finds out whether these new techs die, simmer down, or flourish.
There are a billion and one news sites out there, each reporting thousands of 'just in' stories each day. To have just one that actually tracks the progress of each technology would be amazing. Give each tech their own special page, and then add to them as further news comes in about the SAME tech. Perhaps add a progress bar in the form of a percentage of expected market release too. Pretty please? I'm just getting sick and tired of hearing about these amazing new futuristic gadgets, and then never hearing about them again.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
This problem is nothing new, did you know that when they first introduced the 4 color cga monitors (well 16) they had to rescan all the porn from the green/amber version into the new 16 color format?
There was even a time in the VGA era when you had black&white monitors (I had one), every porn website I visited I had to append B&W to the url (?monitorowner=cheapbastard), so I would get the black&white scans and not the colors ones. Once I forgot and my monitor blew up.
What are you? STUPID?
What you seem to be talking about is the RGB method of storing color information. Simple put, a bmp stores for each pixel the intensity of red, green and blue. Keep two of them at zero and raise the other and you will create that color, zero all of them and you got black and raise them all and you get white. Pretty simple.
BUT this is just a way to do it, and it just so happens that most tech does it this way, scanners are RGB, the imageformat is RGB and the display tech is RGB, but that is just coincedence. It doesn't have to be that way and in fact in for instance the printing industry it isn't.
If you suddenly attached a monitor that no longer needed three seperate color values but one, then all you would need to do is get a new graphics card that could output the new signal. If you are lazy, it would be trivial to put this tech into the monitor itself.
Offcourse it would be best if the whole chain of color information dropped the RGB but that would take time.
But the idea that this tech faces a barrier because the current method of displaying color is RGB is so silly I am at a loss to explain just how idiotic your idea is.
You really should look into proffesional image handling. They had to deal with the limits of RGB for far longer and have come up with plenty of solutions. Even humble photoshop allows you to store images in richer formats.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Doesn't use of IE6 lead to automatic revocation of Slashdot privileges? Just sayin'...
Okay, I admit it... I was suckered in at first... I actually thought "woah, what a cool idea!" But then I reread the article and there it was.... "available ... in as little as two years" (emphasis mine). Two years, it seems, is a small enough time to get people hyped up about something, but still far enough away that by the time two years is up most people will have forgotten about it. In other words, it's a great way to get funding for that's for a "product" that nobody will ever see.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But you see, we can't just create any color we want using only one wavelength. That's why all the color spaces seem to need at least three parameters: RGB, CMY, Lab, HSV, etc.
For example, say you can pick any single wavelength you want, and you pick, oh, that bright "green laser" green #00FF00. How do you make it less saturated? How can it be a shade like celadon #FEFFFE (green but damn near white) or a shade like canned spinach #112211 (green but pretty dark)? Maybe you think you can do it by attenuation: you can get "green laser" green and you can get "spinach green" by dialing down the intensity, but that still won't give you celadon.
In RGB, the difference between Red and Blue versus Green drives the saturation while the average drives the value. In HSV the saturation is a direct component distinct from value. You need at least three parameters for a color, just as much as you need three parameters to describe a location in 3space.
[
...that's a mite better than "Mom, Johnny broke my rigid and inflexible LCD display again!", doncha think? ;-)
To accurately represent any given colour, you need an infinite number of values, not just three, since a colour is the sum of an arbitrary number of wavelengths of light. The red cones in our eyes, for example, detect light at around 580nm. If a photon with a wavelength of 590nm hits the red cone, then it is perceived as being a slightly weaker 580nm signal, rather than a different colour. This lets us fool our eyes into thinking they are seeing the full range of colours when they are only seeing three in a different wavelengths with different amplitudes. A species which saw colours properly would find it much harder to design a colour display.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not when you are at work on a Govt. computer which you can't install another browser on.
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/ has quite a few. A lot of them didn't quite make it.
A highly-reflective screen that can be viewed in ambient light, but has no backlight of its own. Because that worked out ever so well for the original Gameboy Advance.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
I posted a comment to slashdot more than ten years ago about the potential of passive displays that only reflect ambient light, suggesting that there would be potential for display development. Glad to see my prognostication turned out to be true.
A-Bomb
I never noticed because I don't use IE. I just brought up an article in IE6 and, while it doesn't look exactly the same as it does in Firefox, the bar is there as are the More | Prefs | Reply links. I notice the bar doesn't follow me as I scroll down the page and the slider doesn't show up unless I scroll down the page a bit. It doesn't work right but the reply is there and works (for me at least).
"Oh drat these computers, they're so naughty and so complex. I could pinch them."
Marvin the Martian
If this flexible-reflective light display stuff really works, it could be developed into a wearable display that uses optical sensors to display the environment around you, like a primative forerunner of the camoflage technology in the "Predator" movies. How much fun would THAT be?
Wouldn't surprise me at all if the US military already has a whole team of researchers working on this.
"I drive way too fast to worry about cholesterol."
Actually, you can create any color with a mixture of 2 (not 3) fully saturated (i.e. pure spectral) colors. For any given color, find its location in the CIE horseshoe diagram, and then draw any line through that point. The intersections of this line with the boundaries of the horseshoe diagram represent the spectral colors that you need to blend, and the distance of your target color to these point sgives you the weighting ratio. The reason why current displays have to use 3 primaries is because the primaries are fixed, so you cannot create just ANY spectral wavelength.
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
Maybe it could sell to the audio/videophile crowd but it's biologically unnecessary to use more than three primaries. Our retinas have only three kinds of cone cells - roughly red, green and blue. Apparently some people have a fourth type of cone cell but it's extremely rare.
Like Cows (or, I think, hooved animals in general). See either this week's episode of Mythbusters, or this paper, Principles of Cow Comfort, Animal Handling, and Movement:
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
it can produce the whole spectrum of colors, even ultraviolet and infrared light, using only incident light
So if you use it outside on a moonlit night, is it greyscale?
Finally, their computers will have useful displays.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
my Windows box at work is "locked down" (i also work for Govt - paranoid, sissy wankers) and Firefox does a good job of installing itself and running despite supposed controls. just make sure you change the install folder to something you can write to - try "My Documents" if all else fails
btw, my condolences re: your employer ;^)
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
Didn't know about the 4th. I knew about the rods and cones in the eye, but I guess I didn't really think exactly how that has to influence any displays that we create, I thought that you only needed one wavelength per colour.
which is totally what she said
goes another torch-flashlight joke over a poor British person's head! I see you did catch one earlier though...
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
Tetrachromats can perceive four colors.
Also, browns require more than one color to be displayed (although presumably one can dither).
The only problem I can see with this material is that one color will require the shortest distance between crystals, and another will require the longest distance (Red vs. Indigo). When displaying all of one color on a billboard display, will the difference in size actually rip the display out of the frame?
It may be possible for one pixel to cover the gamut via pulse width modulation if they can change color quickly enough.
bite my glorious golden ass.
If used as a substitute for a printed page, the response time of 1s should be perfectly adequate -- that's faster than most people will turn a page, especially with a big, glossy magazine. If this could be permanently applied to curved surfaces, you could also have a car that changes color at the touch of a button. It could be Tom Green's pornmobile as you roll across town, and convert back into an innocent slate gray as you pull up to your date's house. You could flash messages at tailgaters (I've always wanted to install a big rear-facing "WTF" sign but this would be far better), and haven't you always wanted to display a reversed "HANG UP AND DRIVE" on your hood when someone is yapping and weaving in front of you?
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I actually did some research into this.
The reason no image format directly supports HSV or HSL is that in order to have a decent perceptual precision you have to have a LOT of actual precision. (8+8+8 bits is not enough.) In addition, if you lossily compress the H, S, and V/L channels separately, the result looks worse than for YCbCr, or even RGB.
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Andre Arsenault is married to my sister. So I've got some first hand information. - Companies have been lining up to invest in this technology since he wrote his dissertation on it. (INCLUDING the US Military) - All the problems people are pointing out with it, are all on Andre's list of things to fix - It's still in its prototype stage (but its damn fun to play with) PS: C'mon guys, buy a pair of infrared goggles and viola! Invisible Porn!