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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."
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.
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?
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
Indeed. We need some sort of "Popular Science Magazine" factor for this stuff. Say, rate it a PSM2 for "got a patent and looking for investors", or PSFx50 for, say, anything "recently discovered" anywhere or, perhaps, PS-BS=2^132 for anything with the words "fusion" or "nanotechnology" in the title. (Or perhaps a YARP or NARP factor ...with apologies to "Hot Fuzz")
...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?
I see you have a +5 insightful, so this is for you and everyone who agrees with you. Get out of the /. science section if you do not want to hear about this stuff till it hits market. Two years from now if this display is good enough to be sold, you can read about it in /. hardware. Many of us enjoy hearing of new discoveries even if they may never make it to market.
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
I appreciate your desire for real technology rather than vaporware. However this recent publication is interesting scientifically even if it doesn't pan out into useful technology.
Having said that, I would like to point out that this design idea is further along than many (most?) of the "display tech of the week" articles we read. In particular, in the actual scientific paper they show working prototype systems with multi-pixel displays. Their devices, while prototypes, have realistic parameters: 0.3 mm pixel size; 25 micron pixel resolution; 0-3 V switching requirement; stable over hundreds of switching cycles; etc.
Furthermore, they have started a company to begin building real technology: Opalux. Now, I acknowledge that many startups fail... however this technology seems relatively workable, and is further along than many other ideas I've seen.
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'
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.
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http://blog.modernmechanix.com/ has quite a few. A lot of them didn't quite make it.
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
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. . . .