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Nanoresonators Create Ultra-High-Res Displays
TuurlijkNiet writes with this excerpt from Linux for Devices:
"Eat your heart out, 'Retina display.' A new technology unveiled yesterday will allow creating pixels eight times smaller than the ones on Apple's iPhone 4, eliminate the need for polarizer layers, and allow screens to make much more efficient use of available light, say University of Michigan researchers. ... The pixels in the nanoresonator displays are about ten times smaller than those on a typical computer screen, and about eight times smaller than the pixels on the iPhone 4, which are about 78 microns, according to Guo. Such pixel densities could make the technology useful in projection displays, as well as wearable, bendable or extremely compact displays, according to the researchers."
Now that they can make pixels so small that they can only be singled out from distances closer than my eyes can focus, they can finally put some effort into making.. i got nothing, i don't see the point of this.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
The implications of a bendable display are huge, but I think something people don't address enough is durability. I don't mean "this display can be rolled up in a pringles can and still function!", I mean from a puncture and general jostling around perspective. People expect these displays to be paper thin...but what kind of material are these displays being sandwiched in between to ensure that they stay safe?
Living With a Nerd
I for one would love to view porn with those screens O:-)
Can we please stop calling something that's a bit smaller "nano"? It's so stupid. We thought we'd have real nanotechnology by now, we don't. Get over it. Jesus if integrated circuits were invented today with 0.1mm transistors on them we'd call those "nanotransistors".
Looking forward to teeny tiny iPhones
- Things are the way they are because they're coded that way -
Maybe...
I am guessing this is "small enough" yes? Also, I want a netbook with a resolution higher than 1366x768 as well.
I have a feeling we won't be seeing this in consumer products any time soon.
...if it means that we'll start getting computer monitors with higher resolutions again instead of repurposed HDTV screens.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Right now the virtual displays that you wear as eyeglasses simulate a screen in front of the wearer, but they are limited in resolution to something like 1024x768. It would be awesome to have lightweight, high-resolution, wearable displays that would allow interaction with the visible environment just by turning your head. Lots of gaming/simulation possibilities. Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
How does one read the phrase "8 times smaller "? Initially I want to take it as 1/8th the size, but "8 times" would indicate multiplication is involed...
Such pixel densities could make the technology useful in projection displays, as well as wearable, bendable or extremely compact displays, according to the researchers.
I'd be interested in seeing this technology in head-mounted wearable displays, and would like to propose that we term such devices "scouters". I believe they'll become practical once the achievable dpi is over nine-thousand.
Perhaps I'm understanding this wrong, but wouldn't "One Eight the Size" make a lot more sense? Having something 'times smaller' would suggest a difference in size being multiplied, and not fixed size.
Yes, so it's higher than the eye can see, but that does not mean it's useless...
For one thing it may lead to advances in 3D displays without using 3D glasses. For this application it may be useful to be double the resolution, or even higher.
Over the years I have seen so many interesting technologies reported that will 'revolutionize or replace LCD'. Smaller pixels, better light, better this, better that... yet most of them never seem to materialize as a viable product. There was a promising technology similar to led that recently got taken off of life support. I still haven't seen OLED displays on anything bigger than a cell phone. e-paper is expensive and hard to come by.
Everyone is getting all hyped about yet another piece of vaporware. I just can't bring myself to be excited by these 'advances' anymore.
Why would the 'Retina Display' eat its heart out over a research project that is probably years away from development.
Is there really a need for this on slashdot? Tell us about the new tech...leave the rest out.
Uggggghhhhhh! Who is writing this crap?
As nearly as I can tell from the (garbled as usual) article this is about a combination filter and polarizer, not a new type of display. The pixels would still be liquid crystal and I see nothing here that would make them smaller: just more efficient.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Might be interesting in combination with other technology, though... your idea of a projector incorporates magnification. What if the magnification was in your eye? Imagine a biomod that gives you up to 8x optical magnification; switch it in, and you'd be looking at the details on the display, if you wanted to -- they'd be there all the time.
Another thing is stereo output (mistakenly characterized as "3d" by today's marketing droids.) With pixels this tiny, it might be a lot easier to have a set for each eye that are set into what amounts to a wrinkled substrate; one set would direct light at the left eye, while the other did so at the right. Resolution wouldn't suffer because it's still below your ability to resolve the pixels.
You could put a full-HD display in just a corner of your sunglasses, and drop an optical layer over it so that when you were looking into it, you could see detail, depending on the angle your eye created against the optical layer; that would also help manage focus distance issues.
HUDs might be implemented better because the pixels are so small that they just wouldn't be visible when off; a (very) thin line of this material would be like an ultra-thin wire in the glass... but when emitting light at night, would become strikingly visible... depending on the light output, that might even work in the day. Depends on where they're getting the light from, I would think
Instruments like microscopes, telescopes, binoculars, cameras... anything you put your eye to, really... the could benefit from a very tiny display and some small optics to give you status / info on what you were observing.
And hey, how fun would it be for an electronics tech to have an oscilloscope display built into his safety goggles?
I could see a day when the entire multicore computer is in your glasses. You talk to it; it talks to you through the earpiece; display is both full-screen in one corner, and HUD all over the glass; antennae are in the arms of the glasses.
Anyway, just some ideas. There must be tons of applications for really tiny displays, as opposed to big displays with pixels you can't resolve.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
What is great about this is that is more like a repurposing of existing technology rather than Inventing new materials.
The largest issue with bendable displays and a difraction grating is color shifts with viewing angle. Anyone besides me work with diffraction gratings and thin film Dichroic filters?
The color is very vibrant and accurate, providing the viewing angle is controlled. This works with a projector because the angle between the light source and lens is fixed. This does not work for a direct view computer screen. The problems compound with a bendable direct view display.
The truth shall set you free!
Would some nerd please explain (reasonably) the reason why there are polarizing filters in LCD displays right now? I never really understood it.
Nothing to see here, move along!
There is no display, people. This is a research result. How many years and how many major hurdles remain until this can actually be sold to a consumer?
Currently hooked on AMP
Its not about how well your eye can distinguish each pixel, but its the idea that you can put more content on a screen.
Look, you can pick up any magazine or book or any other printed material and find text much smaller then is capable being displayed on any screen. I think that small screen like a cellphone demand ultra high resolutions so that they can match printed text and still have highly readable and clear screens.
Get over the whole "well my eyes can't detect individual pixels any smaller then that so it must be garbage tech" and embrace the brilliance of forward progression.
Here's a great reason to keep going smaller: once you get down to the 10k or so pixels per inch level, you've got the main ingredient for a holographic computer display. As in the pixels are dense enough that you can display the holographic fringes necessary to show a true 3 dimensional image without any glasses/lenticular lenses, or any of the other tricks used today.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Where the resolution gets divided by the number of views displayed simultaneously. If you could make display with 1000 dpi resolution, you could turn it into an autostereoscopic display with horizontal parallax displaying 10 images at 100 dpi. I imagine a 10000 dpi screen would let you create something indistinguishable from a hologram with no glasses required to view it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1320857
WTF is "10 times smaller" and "8 times smaller"? Wonder if it's too much to type "one-tenth the size" and "one-eighth the size"? Or maybe the OP missed fractions in elementary school.
head mounted displays already have high enough resolution, video looks great in them, there are small high resolution projectors already. What we need is 10240x8640 or whatever 50"-100" displays. I'd much rather have one huge high resolution monitor on my desk than 3 1280x1080 displays.
The pixels in the nanoresonator displays are about ten times smaller than those on a typical computer screen, and about eight times smaller than the pixels on the iPhone 4, which are about 78 microns, according to Guo.
Well, Guo is right, I just checked that 326ppi meant pixels of 78um* (and please don't use micron, its usage has been obsoleted more than 40 years ago).
However having horizontal and vertical resolution both multiplied by eight means that pixels are 64 times smaller than those on an iPhone 4.
And "typical computer screens" still usually have a resolution in the 100ppi range. With 10um* pixels, these nanoresonators have 2540ppi, so that's 25 times better, not 10. That also means pixels 645 times smaller.
FYI, wikipedia has a list of diplays by pixel density.
(*) Slashcode is eating both the micro sign and the HTML µ representation !
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
1) is the display bistable?
2) is a backlight required for this display to be useful?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
On my Motorola Milestone (Droid), I've already noticed how useless AA is for fonts. Displays like this may finally give us printer-range DPI and easily readable displays.
Auto-stereo displays project four or more angle views through a prismatic screen lens. This is how the 3D novelty pictures work. On conventional TVs, the horizontal resolution is decreased from 1200 pixels to 400 this way, appear coarse. Super-resolution could be helpful then.
So it is possible to have paper-like display quality?? Or are you saying you take a microscope to reading your paper because it has such high DPI?
I'm not trying to ridicule you, but seeing individual pixels in a display is something I DO NOT WANT. Yet, computer LCD has been stuck at the magic = 85dpi or so for a decade now. I want a display that is as good as at least a 0.1 cent piece of paper of paper, in both DPI and color.
Of course, since you are confusing readability with DPI, almost all modern fonts are specified in point size.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Point_%28typography%29
"The desktop publishing point (DTP point) is defined as 1/72 of the Anglo-Saxon compromise inch of 1959"
So, where is the size of the pixel in this definition? No where! Number of pixels per font size is clearly
DPI * font_size_in_points / 72
So, in current shitty displays @ 72 DPI, a font of size 10 points is 10 pixels! But, on a 720 DPI display, the 10 point font is 100 pixels. 100 pixels allows for smooth lettering instead of the shitty 10 pixels that need aliasing and other tricks just to make them readable.
multiple resolutions? I mean Suppose you had a screen that had a huge resolution. (IE in the millions.) Then if you wanted to do say some standard resolutions like 1280X1024 or 800X600 you could just pick some nice multiple of either of those figures and used most of the screen. (You might have to leave a few lines of pixels off the bottom and right if the screen wasn't an even multiple but if the pixels where extremely small this wouldn't be a problem.) Wouldn't that make the math very quick and easy? (IE if all you had to do is convert your square pixel an resolution X to say a 5X5 square made out of smaller pixels.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
For those of you that have a problem with "8x smaller" quip...
If something is 4 times bigger than something else, it follows that the smaller thing is 4 times smaller than the bigger thing, right? Is my lack of math skills confounding my English comprehension here?
The big deal here is eliminating most of the energy loss in the stages before the liquid crystal rotates the polarization. You have to polarize it and you have to select the color for the pixel.
In an ordinary LCD the light is polarized by throwing away the half of its energy that was at the wrong angle - then each pixel's color is selected by throwing away the light that's at the wrong color. It throws away (far more than) 83% of the light before getting around to modulating what's left.
In this new one the color and polarization are selected by bouncing the rejected photons back into the (very shiny) backlight assembly, so they can bounce around and try again somewhere else. That's a big savings. (Not as good as LED-per-pixel, which only turns electricity into light if you're actually going to try to EMIT the light. But it's getting into the ballpark.)
Shrinking the pixels is a bonus. A very important bonus, since it gives you more resolution and permits things like smaller projectors. But the nearly-lossless filtering is what's enabling.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Another disgusting, inappropriate use of the prefix 'nano'.
There are a whole bunch of displays like this in the work. What they give you is on-off pixels of a single wavelength. That's not all that useful for a display: in order to get gray scale or full color, you need to group a whole bunch of these pixels together, and you still get serious color quantization issues. Furthermore, it doesn't use light very efficiently; a white region would have to be composed of many of these of different colors and it would reflect/transmit only a fraction of the light compared to a standard LCD or e-ink display.
Even with the higher resolution, this display is going to be worse than a regular LCD or OLED display.
How about we get some freakin affordable high DPI 20+ inch displays to work on? Display dpi has been stuck at 100 or less for...decades? And now that the IT industry things that pc users really just want 1080p for video we go backwards.
Your computer will be smaller than your ipod.. and the display is worn. motion and voice controlled... like minority report.
laptops and desktops are relics.
We all know you're a noob though, based on your shabby performance here all week noted next:
Clone got pwned? 3x in the same day here?? Figures! Hilarious amusement and comedy that also exposed clone53421's trolling methods via foaming at the mouth and profanity ridden AC replies instead of his registered user account... What a noob, and on all accounts clone53421 is. Read on people: It's enlightening as the deceitful little coward and troll that clone53421 truly is...:
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1764066&cid=33378014
(Where proof exists that clone53421 doesn't know how to program properly to save his life, and, that he is a "batch boy" at best/most, and not a coder in languages like C/C++, Delphi, VB, or any other truly widely used language in industry/professionally for decades now since he cited what a batchfile tech might in %ProgramFiles% and not the API calls necessary to use environment variables in say, C or C++)
and here, where he doesn't even understand what the intended purpose of C as in terms of PORTABILITY http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1766164&cid=33395852
In the urls above, clone53421 additionally tried the old troll's "partial quote only" trick where the ac opponent he had had noted C and C++ also, where clone53421 omitted his opponent's mention of C/C++, and his ac opponent also showed that Delphi was proven faster than MSVC++ and VB by far in math and strings also in a publication that's about VB no less, and in math and strings work, which every program does by the way, where clone53421 tried to put that language down.
(Hilarious, and clone53421 also tried to fool everyone, by replying as an ac no less on his part rather than under his registered luser account here, like that fooled anybody as well (not))
&
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1755714&cid=33378404 and http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1755714&cid=33353946
(On HOSTS files vs. Adblock, where clone53421 had to go so far off topic it was amazing, and he would do anything to avoid the points posted in favor of HOSTS files vs. adblock (where once again, he cannot, and it is also where clone53421 also tried tdo fool everyone, by replying as an ac yet again as he did in the url above also, no less, once more on his part rather than under his registered luser account here... once more, like that fooled anybody (not)))
Clone53421 was "pwned" soundly on technical matters, and he also laughingly later had resorted to trying to "hide" his errors first by posting off topic to each in reply as anonymous coward also, doubtless in some PUNY attempt to defend himself and FAILING hugely in both links above!
(LMAO: Clone53421 also later yesterday did tons of posts so others would not see his huge mistakes in those urls above via his post history in some attempt on his part to "bury his blunders" in BOTH urls above, & under the tide of the rest of his bullshit and mistakes yesterday (utterly hilarious)).
Poor performance clone (no small wonder you GOT OWNED, lol, and 2 times in a row yesterday by the same ac no less).
FOR MORE AMUSEMENT ON THIS NOTE? SEE CLONE'S "FOAMING AT THE MOUTH REACTION" TO THE ABOVE FROM THIS URL BELOW NEXT, IT'S HILARIOUS, because he gives away the fact he KNOWS he is a noob and he knows we all know it now too:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1764066&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=33354120
"You’re a moron. " - by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 26, @03:03PM (#33384252)
LOL, name calling the "best you got", there, 'batchfile boy'? Apparently so: Well, hate to clue you into this, but "new NEWS":
Your ad hominem attacks and foaming at the mouth profane name tossing reactions only shows your "tell" and that you are upset at yourself mainly, not I, because you exposed yourself as a complete noob in coding because you didn't post that you have to use API calls to get to environment variable
For all the reasons you state these should be lighter too. Real usable 3D goggles now seem feasible.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
"ten times smaller". Does that mean area-wise or length-wise? I never can tell; these things are so ambiguous.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
10 micron design rule is not "nano"-anything!! Nano means nanometer, 1000x smaller than 1 micrometer or micron. Marketing BS 100%
.contract {
.smallprint {
font-family: times,serif;
font-size: 12pt;
}
font-family: times,serif;
font-size: 10px;
}
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Pixels that small means the resolution of monitors will be far higher than what the human eye can perceive. Even if it is just a bit higher, that's all we need. Unless we're trying to cater for a whole new breed of gullible Videophiles...
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Real usable 3-d goggles / augmented reality glasses have been possible for a while now. (This might make the "lump" at the side lighter. But it's fine as is.) Main trick is a layers of index-of-refraction-discontinuity hack that lets them pipe an image in from the side via total internal reflection, then "reflect" it so the light is coming from a virtual image far in front of the viewer.
Company in Israel makes 'em and I've played with a prototype they supplied to NASA. Sweet. I want!
Unfortunately they haven't gone to production, due to some side-effect of the political/war situation over there. (I think it was that too many of their people got drafted over that Palestinian action a couple years ago.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Now that they can make pixels so small that they can only be singled out from distances closer than my eyes can focus, they can finally put some effort into making.. i got nothing, i don't see the point of this.
Simple you set it up to use an Led backlight to project it directly into your eye. Your retina has plenty of resolution and an LED backlight won't hurt your eye. projector fits in your glasses, motorcycle helmet, or any Heads up display you can think of... The actual display pixels are smaller than the ones projected on the back of your retina yet you get a crisp high res picture anyway.
Oh, that's clever - do you recall the company?
Good illustration about the true costs of war, though.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The above is actually very much on-topic. It shows how pixels have started to become irrelevant, as we are now reached a point where the size of pixels can differ an order of magnitude between one display and another. The days of pixel-perfect rendering, thus, are gone; Where 10 pixels would be enough on a regular display to render small print, they would now pretty much be rendered unreadable. Instead, we'd need to render as points instead. The above wraps said facts into a geeky joke, where the contract is rendered in 12 points but the smallprint as 10 pixels, which would render it completely unreadable on the high-res displays being discussed in this thread.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book