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."

Comments

cool

[Jarik C-Bol]

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.

Re:cool

[Pojut]

Now that they can make pixels so small that they can only be singled out from distances closer than my eyes can focus

You answered your own question. Lay them down on transparent material, put that on a pair of glasses, and Bob's your uncle.

Re:cool

[leromarinvit]

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.

How about sharp and non-jagged fonts? It removes the need for anti-aliasing, since your vision acts as the low-pass filter now.

Re:cool

[JargonScott]

I'd like a glasses mounted display that has a respectable resolution for one. Plus maybe it could actually be made in a smaller heads up unit, so a person doesn't look ridiculous like the current nerd-tastic ones do.

Re:cool

[tlhIngan]

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.

Well, for a display on its own, it's not terribly useful. After all, increase the pixel density beyond the iPhone 4 and you'll be adding useless pixels that take memory (framebuffer), power (all those pixels require controllers behind them, plus your 2D and 3D accellerators have to push that many more pixels) and size (enlarged bitmaps and the like take more space). They say an iPad with the PPI of the iPhone 4 would become something like 3000x5000 pixels-ish, which we're talking is latest graphics card style power to render all those pixels.

HOwever, the use is mentioned in the summary - those pico projectors. A small, light, bright, 1080p+ capable projector is probably doable, rather than the WVGA or less resolutions you get now typically.

Re:cool

[sznupi]

Contact lenses with integrated display. I'm overdue with augmenting myself already...

Re:cool

[jeffmeden]

Yeah, that whole antialiasing thing never really caught on did it?

Re:cool

[Defenestrar]

Every layer of polarization cuts the available light in half. Creating a display with pixels smaller than the unaided eye can view without these is actually huge because the current limit in preventing a "realistic" display (i.e. you can't tell the difference between the display and looking out a window) is actually in the contrast resolution (difference between light and dark) which still has a very long way to go before it hits human eye capacity. Freeing up more light allows for brighter whites and perhaps even the possibility of layering displays to get darker blacks (depending on the transparency of "black.")

Re:cool

[Monkeedude1212]

It'd need some way to determine how your eyes are focused though - whether you are intending to look at your hud or something distant. Hold up an object up to your eye about where your glasses would rest. Close the other eye that won't see the object. Look at the object, then look at the wall behind it. Edges should get fuzzy and details will get blurred. When you get into thin lines like a GUI Frame or Text Font, this kind of focus is crucial.

The annoying thing is, once you've been taught to read, any time the center of your gaze lands on upon letters your muscle memory forces you to read it, ultimately taking focus off of what you might have actually been looking at. Its possible to force yourself to ignore it, but you have to generally be trying not to read in order to not to read, which seems weird, because it should be easier to NOT do something than do something, right? Imagine words being printed on your glasses, and how quickly you'll be shifting back and forth between 1 inch from your eye and that person 5 feet away, how much eye strain that will cause and how this system will have to either adjust to be readable at both focal points, or at a very minimum NOT get in your way when you are looking at something else.

This fantasy of an good GUI overlay right over the eyes is really a difficult one to tackle. I'm not saying it can't be done, but even once we get the display down, there are still hurdles.

Re:cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that they can make pixels so small that they can only be singled out from distances closer than my eyes can focus

You answered your own question. Lay them down on transparent material, put that on a pair of glasses, and Bob's your uncle.

Ah, brilliant! Because when you wear the glasses, it'll project an image of your uncle over your friend Bob any time you're looking at him, AND it'll be at a high enough resolution that you can look really close at him and still not make out the pixels?

Man, this is going to be GREAT for people who can't stand their friend Bob but who have really cool uncles!

Re:cool

[nacturation]

It'd need some way to determine how your eyes are focused though - whether you are intending to look at your hud or something distant. Hold up an object up to your eye about where your glasses would rest. Close the other eye that won't see the object. Look at the object, then look at the wall behind it.

Now look back at the object. Sadly, it isn't your eye. But if it had a fine enough resolution it could be compatible with your eye. Look down, back up. Where are you? You're on Slashdot looking for the display your display could look like. What's in your hand? Back at me. I have it, it's the iPhone 5 with a display so fine you can't tell the difference. Look again. The iPhone display is now a projector. Anything is possible when your device is made from nanoresonators and not a retina display. I'm modded up.

Re:cool

[RevWaldo]

Beyond Bluetooth - taking lookin' crazy in public to a whole other level!

- Give this lady some room! She's having a seizure!
- Huh, what? Who me? No, no, 'scool. I'm just watching the US Open...Yes! You go Serena!

.

Re:cool

[Surt]

I think the whole point is that it did catch on, like a lot of other sucky engineering workarounds. And now we might have a chance to kill it at last.

Re:cool

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Actually, Fanny's my aunt.

Re:cool

[blair1q]

3D screens that don't need goggles

see-through HUD screens built into glasses

high-res video on keyboard buttons

only better

Re:cool

[slick7]

Contact lenses with integrated display. I'm overdue with augmenting myself already...

Inter ocular lenses with wifi capabilities would be even more efficient.

Re:cool

[bziman]

I'm modded up.

I don't have any mod points, so I just wanted to say thank you.

Re:cool

[John Hasler]

While better than nothing, it's a poor substitute for the real thing.

Re:cool

[$RANDOMLUSER]

increase the pixel density beyond the iPhone 4 and you'll be adding useless pixels...

Unless perhaps you're interlacing. I guess it depends on what kind of framerates you can get.

Re:cool

[thijsh]

Man, you're nano-resonating out of control there!

Re:cool

[draconx]

the current limit in preventing a "realistic" display (i.e. you can't tell the difference between the display and looking out a window) is actually in the contrast resolution (difference between light and dark) which still has a very long way to go before it hits human eye capacity.

Actually, parallax (the lack thereof) is a bigger issue here. Unless your display can simultaneously show different images to different people based on their position, it will never be mistaken for a window.

Re:cool

[Yvan256]

Cool funny rewrite of the ad while still being on-topic. Bravo.

Here's the original ad, in case someone has been living in a cave with no internet access for the last few months and has never seen it.

Re:cool

[Korin43]

Inter ocular lenses with wifi capabilities would be even more efficient.

Until you have to change the battery in your eye..

Re:cool

[DurendalMac]

I'm no expert on this, but what if they could be used to make LCDs that don't look like ass at non-native resolutions? If one pixel at 1920x1080 is actually a bunch of these tiny pixels acting as one (at least as far as the OS is concerned), then it would be far easier to "enlarge" that collection of pixels to act as a single pixel at 1280x720 by simply enlarging it by the proper number of subpixels. Seems feasible to me, but maybe someone with more experience in that area can chime in.

Re:cool

[MORB]

The grand parent does have a point. Since I bought a nexus one (which have a pixel density almost as high as the iphone 4), I'm yearning for the day where computer monitors reach the same pixel density. You have no idea how good it makes text look until you see it. My 21" 16:9 monitor feels ugly and pixelated now in comparison.

Re:cool

[PsyciatricHelp]

I am imagining an IMAX screen made of this. holy crap. But does this mean my Phone is gonna be running 10800p resolution while my 60" is still sitting at 1080. The processing power for all the additional pixels is gonna be ridiculous.

Re:cool

[beelsebob]

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...

Super high resolution screens that look as good as print media even under extremely close inspection?
Games that don't need anti-aliassing because you can't see the jaggies anyway?
User interfaces that can scale gracefully without doing an ugly cludge in changing the display resolution and making everything blurry?

Re:cool

[maxume]

I can't even focus about where glasses would rest. I understand this to be true for most people.

So once you start using a beam to draw on the retina, you can probably manage to measure the current focal distance and simply have the projection go along for the ride. Or perhaps have it pop into view when you look at a certain spot relative to your body and drop out of existence when you look away from that spot.

Re:cool

[Hylandr]

Or contacts maybe? Other sensors to detect your iris' moving to focus, light exposure, and direction perhaps?

Perhaps someday...

- Dan.

Re:cool

[tholomyes]

Yeah, ever since I read the story I wondered how this guy replaces the battery in his wireless bionic eye.

Re:cool

[Antity-H]

Does it mean we can get cheap high resolution (better than 96dpi) screens for our computers within a forseeable future ? if so I am all for it !

Re:cool

[mestar]

The pixels wouldn't be too small. Take a long black line on a complete white background, one pixel wide. Is this line simply invisible to the human eye on those sub-eye resolutions? I don't think so.

So, bring on those uber-resolutions. Perhaps the pictures will simply look more beautiful, even if they shouldn't. Anyway, I would like to see those monitors anyway.

Re:cool

[xMilkmanDanx]

Except a well designed hud would be reflected and focus adjusted for a relaxed eye (i.e. infinite distance) instead of trying to focus for 3 inches away. Still distracting but not the eye strain from going from focusing close to far to close you're describing.

Re:cool

[xMilkmanDanx]

since it's a replacement for a run of the mill glass eye I imagine he just pops it out and puts in a new one?

Re:cool

[azmodean 1]

Well, for a display on its own, it's not terribly useful. After all, increase the pixel density beyond the iPhone 4 and you'll be adding useless pixels that take memory (framebuffer), power (all those pixels require controllers behind them, plus your 2D and 3D accellerators have to push that many more pixels) and size (enlarged bitmaps and the like take more space).

What part of "iPhone 4 has resolution that matches the resolution of the human eye when held at arm's length" did you miss? I'm guessing the part in bold. I for one would absolutely love to have a pair of glasses that met or exceeded the resolution my eyes could perceive. And frankly, even if the display is "wasting pixels" in a given scenario, the obvious solution is to cut back on processing somehow, perhaps by lowering the resolution of image rendering to what is needed instead of the native resolution of the display. Sure the device will need beefier hardware for the situations where it actually needs to render at native resolution, but nothing is forcing the system to actually use all of those resources at all times.

Re:cool

[Defenestrar]

With an active display you can use software to account for parallax for a single user (or multiple users with very similar points of view).

It's been done already with webcams and video conferencing, computer monitors, and even a fake office window (using a wiimote I think - I couldn't find the video where I thought it was though. It showed San Francisco in the distance though - maybe someone else remembers where it is).

You're right about multiple viewers being a pretty trick.

Re:cool

[Kielistic]

If you don't see the point in making technology smaller perhaps slashdot isn't the place for you?

Re:cool

[xMilkmanDanx]

The fix would be to have the monitor hardware take the limited info and spread it around to the appropriate groups of pixels instead of trying to have the video card render and push billions of pixels through the video cable. 1920x1080? right, each pixel of input maps to blocks of 15x15 (to pull a number out of my ass) on the actual display. 960x540? each pixel maps to blocks of 30x30, etc.

Re:cool

[sznupi]

How basically the same thing but with helluva harder procedure of replacement would be more efficient?

Re:cool

[shadowrat]

Instead of computers having bugs, bugs can FINALLY have computers!!!

Re:cool

[sznupi]

Not much crazier than ordinary contact lenses, I'd guess. And as for crazy reactions...you don't need corneal display for that.

Re:cool

[jack2000]

Serves you right for disabling subpixel font smoothing. Windows based oses have had cleartype since forever. Same goes for linux distros.

Re:cool

[clone53421]

That depends on whether you are thinking of pixels as rectangles of finite size (which should be partly one colour and partly another), or as individual dimensionless points of colour.

The “mathematically correct way” is to think of them as points.

Re:cool

[MORB]

I never disable it.

Re:cool

[Yvan256]

I now feel like diamonds on a horse.

Wait, why did I say that?!

Re:cool

[Surt]

You get the facts close to right, but reach exactly the wrong conclusion.

The whole point of a higher resolution display would be to do away with the need for anti-aliasing by NOT NEEDING to accommodate the discrete raster.

Re:cool

[Monkeedude1212]

But how do you look at the bottom right part of a hud then? You'd need some serious training in peripheral vision or trained to look in various directions with a relaxed eye, which is not as easy as it seems.

Re:cool

[clone53421]

Even if the display pixels are smaller than you can resolve, a non-antialiasing renderer will still produce visible aliasing. Aliasing is a frequency domain effect.

Photons are discrete elements, but they’re small enough that we don’t have the problems you describe with discrete sampling of a continuous function.

Ideally (mathematically) you want to be working with elementary points. No anti-aliasing is necessary at that level, and if your physical approximation is close enough to elementary points anti-aliasing also becomes unnecessary.

Re:cool

[clone53421]

The resolution at which artifacts are negligible is so much higher that you'd waste more processing power on rendering without antialiasing at that resolution than you'd need with antialiasing at a resolution which is just high enough that you can't resolve individual pixels anymore

If you can’t resolve individual pixels, your eyes are already doing anti-aliasing in that multiple pixels are triggering the same receptor cell in your eye, which averages them out.

Re:cool

[clone53421]

Yeah, that whole dithering thing never really caught on did it? Going from 16 colours to 16,777,216 hasn’t removed the need for it at all.

Re:cool

[Surt]

When the pixels are too small to be identified by the human visual system, you no longer need anti-aliasing to approximate a better line, and you can save that performance waste. What you're missing is that while the high resolution is still a discrete raster, it stops mattering whether you apply the aliasing formula to it when it passes the capacity of the eye to resolve the details. Yes, if you put the display under a microscope, you might still see an improvement from anti-aliasing, but otherwise, you shouldn't care.

Re:cool

[Quirkz]

Even better, what about a much wider range of resolutions? It'd be like changing your 3-speed bicycle into an 18-speed one. Pick all kinds of resolutions. There's no need to be limited to a couple of weird sets of multiples.

Also, this ought to give us a lot more flexibility in terms of magnification. Right now it seems like the choices for icons/text tend to be either A) super tiny, B) normal, or C) frigging huge! As my co-workers get older I watch one after another of them hit a point where they give up on "normal" and bump things up one step, to the point where about four icons fill their entire desktop. Some middle ground might be nice.

Re:cool

[Dashiva Dan]

I'm against getting sucked into commercial advertising, but after the old spice phenomenom, I've given it some serious thought and decided that I don't mind being sucked in when the advertising has that ... Je ne sais quoi... It's not going to happen often by it's own virtue, and that company that can come up with it can have my business, or at least "have me as a tool" to forward their advertising (still never bought any old spice products, and don't plan to)
I wish every advertiserment I happened accross had the same 'Je ne sais quoi' of awesomness.

Re:cool

[clone53421]

The solution to banding is more bits per pixel, not dithering.

Re:cool

[Dashiva Dan]

And aside for the obvious HUD-like qualities, remember you could have an external display on contact lenses. Programmable eye colour, animated eye colour. before long we'll have contacts that make a person's eyes look like marbles of doom, or something even more imaginative. That'd probably work better with e-ink unless you wanted your eyes to also glow in the dark.

Re:cool

[Dashiva Dan]

These would be so much fun to hack. 'popups' are going to be so amusing 50 years from now...

Re:cool

[Jesse_vd]

Hold up an object up to your eye about where your glasses would rest. Close the other eye that won't see the object. Look at the object, then look at the wall behind it. Edges should get fuzzy and details will get blurred.

well of course it's blurred you made me take my glasses off!

Re:cool

[CarpetShark]

The trick is to understand that you're NOT supposed to be able to see pixels. See pixels in the sky, do you? Computer displays should NEVER have used pixels. It was all an ugly hack because the performance wasn't available to treat everything as vector/3d graphics.

Re:cool

[dissy]

i don't see the point of this.

That's because your current monitor isn't a high enough resolution.
Once you purchase a nanoresonator display, it will all come into focus!

Re:cool

[Gilmoure]

they can finally put some effort into making..

Really tiny pr0n?

Micro-grits?

Man, all the Giffy Girls stuff I saved from the early 90's (it took too long to d/l to throw away) is gonna be really small!

Re:cool

[sznupi]

Hm, red glowing ones should be doable already...not sure how great of an idea that would be ;)

Re:cool

[Psiven]

Well if you find the ad funny, then who is using who?

"If you don't pay attention to every little detail, you miss most of the jokes." -RAW

Re:cool

[Thing 1]

... and what if Bob's yer uncle?

Re:cool

[slick7]

Yeah, ever since I read the story I wondered how this guy replaces the battery in his wireless bionic eye.

RFID is wireless AND it has no batteries.

Re:cool

[DurendalMac]

I think you're missing the point. The point is that the "native resolution" is not one physical pixel = one pixel as seen by the viewer. It's the idea that one physical pixel = a large number of tiny subpixels, which would be small enough that the blur effect would be mitigated. Instead of trying to scale to a lower resolution by current methods, each resolution would be assigned a certain number of subpixels per perceived pixel, and since each one is just a tiny part of a pixel at ANY resolution (we're talking about far smaller pixels than the eye can even perceive), the picture winds up being much crisper, thus making it much more pleasant to look at.

Re:cool

[angeli]

Images in aircraft HUD's are focused at infinity (holo image), so when you look at the scenery the image is in focus. So for the cheap model, just stare off into space. For the upgrade add some eyeball sensor wiz to track your focus. Don't remember where I saw it, but someone already figured out how to do that. Next, go full 3D with transparencies in front of both eyes. Styrofoam swords and spears, the other guys on the battleground see my Krull rig and a real-looking sword. Paint-balling with full FX overlay, Hooah! 'been waiting a couple of decades for this--ready for it now.

Re:cool

[angeli]

'course the day after they came out a thousand geeks figure out how to hook the glasses to, um, back-up sensors off a car bumper or something, to see through girl clothes. Smarter geek makes his $billion in radar-reflective underwear.

Re:cool

[russ1337]

I just have to day that is the best comment I've ever seen. I actually found it via seenonslash.com.

Bendable displays

[Pojut]

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?

Re:Bendable displays

[Jarik C-Bol]

same stuff they layer onto your car's windshield to make it safety glass. watch the myth-busters episode about tornados throwing 2/4's. some of the laminates (which are flexible plastics) can withstand the force of a 2x4 traveling insane speeds and not rip/break. a simple layer of this on both sides would make the display nigh-indestructible for most users.

Re:Bendable displays

[sznupi]

Such expectations are probably because of how those bendable displays were always showed off - as something rollable & paper thin. Yeah, not striking me as practical.

But I suspect their properties will matter most to manufacturers - it will become easy to cover non-flat surfaces with displays and/or to cover most surface area of some device. Oh, with a solid protective cover on top.

Re:Bendable displays

[JWRose]

I think you're overstating what the saftey glass does. I does not prevent the glass from breaking. All it does is prevent the broken glass from being scattering all over the place. So Objects, most certainly, can pass through the safety glass, it just won't cause the broken glass from falling all over you.

Re:Bendable displays

[cynyr]

are any of these fordable, like fold up and stick in my back pocket and sit on sort of foldable?

Re:Bendable displays

[CeruleanDragon]

But the big question is: can they withstand a WiiMote being hurled into them? That's what I really want to know.

Re:Bendable displays

[tool462]

I'd recommend an Adamantium-Kryptonite alloy substrate. That way you can ensure that the only being strong enough to damage the material would also be rendered impotent by it.

IPhone Nano ...

[Zorlon]

Looking forward to teeny tiny iPhones

Re:IPhone Nano ...

[jellomizer]

In reality for iPhone displays the "Retina Display" is really as good as you are ever going to need, just like we never gotten anything more then 32bit color depth (With is still only 24bit color depth with extra command colors) . This technology isn't really good for improving the mobile devices with screens, but for projectors, which can project say a 1080p display and fit in your cellphone. Keeping the "Retina Display" is actually a really good idea as the new phones can get much faster without have to use its new found speed to more graphic processing.

Re:IPhone Nano ...

[sconeu]

Sort of like the eyePhone?

Re:IPhone Nano ...

[KingFrog]

Power, dude. If you cut the waste power in the lighting of the display from 95% to 90%, you've cut about in half the amount of energy needed to produce lighting for a display at a given brightness. Since lighting the display is the biggest single item in portable electronics energy budgets, this would allow longer lifespans, smaller, lighter devices, and more functionality - all at the same time.

In only 8 more years

[frnic]

Maybe...

Can I get my watch in 1080p now?

[erroneus]

I am guessing this is "small enough" yes? Also, I want a netbook with a resolution higher than 1366x768 as well.

Re:Can I get my watch in 1080p now?

[BlueParrot]

I am guessing this is "small enough" yes?

At least read the summary. If you want a high resolution display from a compact projector small pixel sizes are a must. Imagine as an example trying to squeeze a projector into a mobile phone.

Re:Can I get my watch in 1080p now?

[mangu]

Imagine as an example trying to squeeze a projector into a mobile phone.

The way I would do that is with three lasers, red, green, and blue, and some movable mirrors.

Re:Can I get my watch in 1080p now?

[TheThiefMaster]

I would prefer it if I could get a display of over 22" and over 72 dpi...

Manufacturability? Cost?

[CityZen]

I have a feeling we won't be seeing this in consumer products any time soon.

Re:Manufacturability? Cost?

[xMilkmanDanx]

not necessarily. sometimes new products can come with significant manufacturing cost reductions, not often, but sometimes.

Could be good...

[Angst Badger]

...if it means that we'll start getting computer monitors with higher resolutions again instead of repurposed HDTV screens.

Re:Could be good...

[blair1q]

The fact that we weren't getting repurposed HDTV screens back when 1920x1080 was new hotness was a scam. It was a collusion between LCD manufacturers to keep prices high for both computer monitors (which were available at 1050-pixel vertical resolution for no good reason) and TV screens.

Now you get higher resolution by either adding a second monitor or getting a humungous monitor. Higher resolution on the size of monitor you have now may not do you any good, unless you want 3D without the goggles in which case a multiplier of current maximum pixel densities is an awesome enabler.

Re:Could be good...

[cynyr]

how about just 17" 4k2k monitors... or even a 17" 1080p...

Re:Could be good...

[renoX]

Well, I'm not sure that this is a technology question: IBM has made a 200 ppi screen (*) a long time ago,
which was quite expensive as expected as it was a new technology, but the curious thing is that no other
LCD maker tried to compete on resolution, so prices didn't go down!

I thought at first it was because Windows XP couldn't use correctly high resolution display,
but Windows Vista and 7 are supposed to be able to use them and there's still no vendors trying to sell
high resolution display for consumers.

*: http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/roentgen/

Re:Could be good...

[Lanteran]

Indeed, HDTV has caused quite a lot of stagnation in that field. http://xkcd.com/732/

Re:Could be good...

[toddestan]

We have 17" 1080p right now. The only problem is you can only get the screen as part of a laptop. Where are the high DPI desktop screens?

How about wearable displays?

[maillemaker]

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

Re:How about wearable displays?

[jeffmeden]

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

Possibilities like not needing to waste desk space with a monitor? Technically one person can't (with normal vision) look at more than one display at a time; yet having 2,3, even 4 on a desk is becoming increasingly popular. A pair of display glasses with accurate motion sensors could give you a display of unlimited size. Plus! Now my desk will have room for that Zen garden...

Re:How about wearable displays?

[Jarik C-Bol]

ok, you win, thats the most awesome idea so far. A totally virtual display of infinite possible dimension would be fantastic. Only problem is that you need more than one headset available if you need to show people something. (that or a normal monitor that reflects where you are looking)

Re:How about wearable displays?

[SQLGuru]

That's what the pico-pico projector in the glasses is for. When you want to share, you turn on the projector and it will show what you are seeing in the direction you are looking. And it can even be "magic" enough to turn off the glasses level display when the projector is on....that's how you could continue to use the glasses when there was no backlight.

Re:How about wearable displays?

[Qango]

Hmm, didn't I see that in Heavy Rain?

i never know what that means...

[WiglyWorm]

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...

Re:i never know what that means...

[by (1706743)]

Multiply by 1/8, maybe? I agree though -- it does seem a bass ackwards way of comparing sizes.

Re:i never know what that means...

[hedwards]

Not necessarily, Would a 16x CDROM be 8 times faster than a 2x CDROM or an 8x CDROM drive? Which is one of the reasons why that was always kind of a stupid way of naming things. Because technically it is 8x faster, because 1x is a defined unit.

Re:i never know what that means...

[MozeeToby]

Just like the phrase "throw the baby out with the bathwater" would indicate that the situation involves babies, baths, and infanticide. Yes, the meaning of X times smaller isn't totally clear, that's because it's an idiom. It's been in use since before your great-great-grandparents were born and it's just one of those things that you have to define in terms of the whole phrase rather than the individual words that make it up.

Re:i never know what that means...

[MightyYar]

Wow, I never thought of that phrase as ambiguous in the least. "8 times smaller/slower" always means divide by 8 and "8 times larger/faster" always means multiply by 8. I wouldn't use it in a scientific paper, but it should be okay in informal usage.

Re:i never know what that means...

[Paradise Pete]

Because technically it is 8x faster

Technically it is 8x as fast, or 7x faster. Otherwise you'd have to say the same speed is 1x faster. You're comparing how fast they are, not how faster they are.

Re:i never know what that means...

[WiglyWorm]

That's what makes this OK.

A 1x CD-ROM is defined as a certain transfer rate. 2x is twice that base rate. 8x is 8 times that base rate.

"Pixel" is not a defined unit of measure. Pixels can be large, as in your old 40" standard def CRT television, or small, as in the iPhone "retina display". I can think of several ways "8 times smaller" could be defined. The one that seems to make the most sense, to me, is the one that has nothing to do with multiplication.

Re:i never know what that means...

[WiglyWorm]

Ok. If this is some sort of standard that I missed out on, I'll accept that. I do think it's stupid though. We already have a phrase for that definition: "an 8th the size".

Re:i never know what that means...

[clone53421]

No, that’d be 8 times larger.

Re:i never know what that means...

[albedoa]

If the author indeed meant that, then yes, we would obviously prefer something that makes sense over something that does not.

Re:i never know what that means...

[blair1q]

Yes, that's what it means.

I never know why people don't get what it means.

It may be mathematically ungrammatical, but it's perfectly clear what it means.

Except for the part where they don't say whether it's by lineal or areal dimensions.

Re:i never know what that means...

[albedoa]

lol oops yeah, I just realized he said "smaller". That still makes no sense!

Re:i never know what that means...

[clone53421]

The point is it’s a reciprocal relation.

If A is 8 times larger than B, it follows that B is 8 times smaller than A. That’s the only interpretation that makes any sense at all. So of course 8 times smaller means 1/8th the size.

Re:i never know what that means...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I wish I was so smart that I couldn't make sense of that phrase.

Re:i never know what that means...

[MightyYar]

Marketeers are always going to go with what "sounds best" or what sells. Saying that a product is one-eighth of the competing product doesn't resonate as well as saying it is 8 times better.

And to be fair, if it is smallness you are after, it may very well be 8 times better... don't blame the marketeers, blame the human brain :)

Re:i never know what that means...

[RedWizzard]

Wow, I never thought of that phrase as ambiguous in the least. "8 times smaller/slower" always means divide by 8 and "8 times larger/faster" always means multiply by 8. I wouldn't use it in a scientific paper, but it should be okay in informal usage.

Always? "8 times faster than walking pace" is pretty obvious, sure. What about "8 times faster than a blink of an eye"?

In this case "8 times small than a iPhone pixel" are they talking about area or width?

Re:i never know what that means...

[MightyYar]

You changed the argument. If they said "one eighth the size of an iPhone pixel" it would be no clearer whether they are talking about area or width.

Re:i never know what that means...

[RedWizzard]

You changed the argument. If they said "one eighth the size of an iPhone pixel" it would be no clearer whether they are talking about area or width.

My point is that statements like "eight times smaller" are ambiguous, It doesn't really matter whether it's the "eight times" or the "smaller" that causes the issue. In both cases it's simply sloppiness - there is no reason why the author couldn't be precise ("pixels 10 microns across rather than the 78 micron wide pixels in the iPhone 4"). Using terms like "eight times smaller" just causes unnecessary confusion.

Re:i never know what that means...

[MightyYar]

there is no reason why the author couldn't be precise... Using terms like "eight times smaller" just causes unnecessary confusion.

My cynical side would say that when someone is marketing themselves, the whole point is to cause "unnecessary confusion" :)

In defense of this article, they give the dimensionless, marketing "eight times smaller" up in the headline, and then the detail follows:

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.

It's pretty clear now that we are talking about 78/8 = ~10um. And in fact they have a picture just above this showing individual pixels approximately 10um apart.

I'm not a big fan of pedantry in general, but IMHO the above quoted part of the article is crystal fucking clear :)

Wearable displays?

[Guppy]

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.

Re:Wearable displays?

[TimMD909]

I'm pretty sure no matter how nice the resolution, using your scouter to gauge the power level of a Super Saiyajin Level 2 is still not going to happen.

This could lead to 3D display advances.

[Domini]

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.

Wake me when there's a product

[ilsaloving]

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.

Re:Wake me when there's a product

[insufflate10mg]

Do you believe that 40 years from now the advances you refer to will not have manifested in products? We are living in a time of incredible technological advancement, and you should be thankful that you are witnessing thousands of "tiny steps." By your logic, because the product is not available RITE NOWZ, it never will be. Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace. Grace is a little girl who didn't wash her face.

Re:Wake me when there's a product

[gandhi_2]

Patience is a virtue, virtue is a grace. Grace is a little girl who didn't wash her face.

My co-workers are wondering why i can't stop laughing.

Re:Wake me when there's a product

[ilsaloving]

Perhaps my point didn't come across well. I was talking mostly about 'revolutionary technologies' that don't see the light of day, or at best, materialize as something that's barely passable.

OLED technology has been claiming it would revolutionize displays for the past 20 years. SED technology was recently abandoned despite being touted as the next big thing. Whatever happened to that amazing holographic storage by inPhase?
Oh, and we can't forget Duke Nukem Forever in this list. ;)

Eat your heart out..

[gbrandt]

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.

Re:Eat your heart out..

[Yvan256]

Maybe TuurlijkNiet hates Apple.

Re:Eat your heart out..

[shadowrat]

It certainly reads like the poster has an ax to grind against the retina display. for all we know, this will be the tech that drives the iphone6's display.

Re:Eat your heart out..

[stewbacca]

Apple can start eating once a competitor puts this on the market. But by then, Apple will already have done so as well. Stupid summary.

"eight times smaller"

[albedoa]

Uggggghhhhhh! Who is writing this crap?

Re:"eight times smaller"

[Surt]

Uggggghhhhhh! Who is writing this crap?

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22eight+times+smaller%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

About 100K writers.

Filter, not Display

[John Hasler]

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.

Re:Filter, not Display

[blair1q]

LCDs work by polarizing light emitted by a lamp behind them (or light reflected from the front that is reflected by mirrored surface behind them).

You make pixels by making small regions that you can control electrically. But with LCD there's a limit to how small you can make them because of the crystals involved. And to do colors you make a color mask and have each color covered by one region, and open or close them in combination to make one RGB pixel.

These researchers have found a new polarization method that also does color filtering, and does it in a much smaller space.

The picture of the M with the 3-micron scale bar on it is sick. It tells me that the "8 times smaller" thing is way understating the resolution these guys have achieved. A pixel on a good monitor is 240 microns across, and it would take a square a couple dozen pixels across to render that picture with the fidelity of those angles and spaces. Their effective pixels are a fraction of a micron across. That's a factor of about 1000, not 8, unless they were comparing to some other technology that isn't yet in stores.

This stuff is totally FTW.

The hard part now will be finding enough CPU or GPU power to drive it all in real-time.

Re:Filter, not Display

[Panaflex]

It's a 2D array of MEMS which open and close a slit in a variable size, creating a light grate which has the effect of changing the light color.

Re:Filter, not Display

[bperkins]

> It's a 2D array of MEMS which open and close a slit in a variable size

No.

The resonator is what cause the interference that controls the colors rendered. If you look at the article you'll see there's no mention of controlling the pitch after it's fabricated.

Re:Filter, not Display

[Panaflex]

Apparently I'm wrong (yeah, bad bad article!) It's just a new color filter + polarizer. There is no way in the design to modify the color, as it's only a structural grating.

I guess in the future a design could be created if they had a way modify these structures - this isn't it. But it's promising.

Re:Filter, not Display

[clone53421]

The article actually said how they’d create color: red, green, and blue sub-pixels, just like LCDs currently use.

Red, green and blue pixel components could be made in one step by cutting arrays of slits in the stack, according to the researchers.

Re:Filter, not Display

[John Hasler]

These researchers have found a new polarization method that also does color filtering...

That what I said. But that's all it does: there is no electrical control. You still need LCD pixels for that.

Re:Filter, not Display

[blair1q]

Hmm. Somehow I got that they were doing that in their film, but it appears all they've done is make the film polarizing and omitted one of the LCD layers.

Which means that M isn't an active display, it's a canned demo set into the film.

Oh well. Maybe next week.

Re:Filter, not Display

[John Hasler]

The article actually said how they'd create color: red, green, and blue sub-pixels, just like LCDs currently use.

Yes, with a seperate LCD shutter for each subpixel, just like LCDs currently use.

Re:Filter, not Display

[clone53421]

But smaller, and they only need one polarizing filter because the silts already produce polarized light.

Magnify where?

[fyngyrz]

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.

Re:Magnify where?

[Yvan256]

What I'd like is projectors so small and yet so powerful that I could project what I'm seeing in front of me so that other people around me could also see what I'm seeing.

Re:"Eight times smaller"?

[Locke2005]

"One eighth the size" would make even more sense! The only source of confusion I see is that it is not clear whether the area is 1/8 as much (i.e. 8 times more pixels per square inch) or the width and height are 1/8 as much (i.e. 8 times more pixels per linear inch).

Re:Bendable displays has a problem

[Technician]

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.

8x smaller then what we can perceive???

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing to see here, move along!

Re:"Eight times smaller"?

[clone53421]

iPhone pixels: ~78 microns
These (from the legend in the picture in TFA): ~10 microns

Re:come on, nerds

[clone53421]

A LCD uses two polarizing filters. One of them “flips” its polarization 90 degrees when you apply a current.

Depending on the current, the polarizing filters can either be lined up (0 degrees) or perpendicularly aligned (90 degrees), or anywhere in-between.

When the polarizing filters are lined up, the backlight shines through (or the ambient light from the room is reflected off of the back of the display. When the polarizing filters are perpendicular, the pixel is black.

The color itself is created by a normal filter; individual red, green, and blue sub-pixels are used to create any RGB value.

No display was unveiled

[wealthychef]

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?

Holograms for one...

[snooo53]

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.

Re:Holograms for one...

[Defenestrar]

Would you need the light source to be in front of the display (instead of back-lit) in such a case? Holograms function off of the grating or double-slit phenomena of interfering light. Also, would you be doing the separate red green blue laser illumination of modern color holograms or would we find a cheaper/safer/less complicated method of using a white light? Or would these be self illuminating pixels where there's a graphics driver calculating the light phase and interference patterns... Sorry... the pondering has gotten away from me, I think I'm going to stop now before I self nerd snipe.

Re:Holograms for one...

[snooo53]

I could be way off base here but my understanding is that for a display with that pixel density the light coming from the different areas of the screen is sufficiently dense to cause interference at the focal point before reaching the eye (with a ton of very specialized calculations in the background). So yeah in essence, it's displaying the fringes on the display rather than the image. If you do a search for "computer generated holography", CGH there's some interesting links to papers and current methods of doing this.

Re:Holograms for one...

[synaptic]

Holographic fringe patterns were my first thought too.

mod parent up!

Autostereoscopic Displays

[cowtamer]

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

Maths are hard for a journalist :-\

[alexhs]

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 !

Two questions

[mark-t]

1) is the display bistable?

2) is a backlight required for this display to be useful?

The death of font antialising

[lucian1900]

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.

further explaination

[peter303]

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 would a high res display be good for

[NotSoHeavyD3]

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.)

Re:So would a high res display be good for

[John Whitley]

Wouldn't that make the math very quick and easy?

At that point, "quick and easy" math is largely irrelevant. If you can drive the MM x MM pixel display in the first place, you'll just apply an appropriate image filter to provide the best upscaled visuals -- which isn't necessarily an integer-multiple pixel expansion.

Observation: your web browser is already doing this constantly; a heck of a lot of web images are scaled these days (although generally downscaled rather than upscaled as we're talking about here).

Re:So would a high res display be good for

[NotSoHeavyD3]

But it always seems when those filters get applied the image is blurry. (Which I'm guessing is an issue when mapping pixels.) Hmm, if you had a high resolution could you avoid the blurriness?

Re:So would a high res display be good for

[clone53421]

you'll just apply an appropriate image filter to provide the best upscaled visuals -- which isn't necessarily an integer-multiple pixel expansion

And also sometimes could be.

Question for "times smaller" problem

[stewbacca]

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?

Re:Question for "times smaller" problem

[clone53421]

No, that’s exactly correct.

The reason nerds are so confused by it is that everyone knows that if something is 100% bigger than something else, it follows that the smaller thing is 50% smaller than the bigger thing.

Higher res is bonus - energy is the big deal.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.

Re:"Eight times smaller"?

[Locke2005]

So the pixels are either 8 times more dense or 64 times more dense, depending on whether you're talking linear measurement or area.

not new, not useful

[yyxx]

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.

Re:not new, not useful

[clone53421]

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.

If they switch quickly enough you strobe it and rely on persistence of vision.

Re:not new, not useful

[yyxx]

You mean like they do for DLP? I'm not sure that works for these kinds of displays. Furthermore, even if it does, you end up using a lot more power then.

300 DPI Displays

[Lawrence_Bird]

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.

Also weight. IMAX 3D is Dead.

[bill_mcgonigle]

For all the reasons you state these should be lighter too. Real usable 3D goggles now seem feasible.

"ten times smaller" ?

[Twinbee]

"ten times smaller". Does that mean area-wise or length-wise? I never can tell; these things are so ambiguous.

It's not "nano"!

[Jeprey]

10 micron design rule is not "nano"-anything!! Nano means nanometer, 1000x smaller than 1 micrometer or micron. Marketing BS 100%

Also, why?

[mrjb]

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...

Re:Also, why?

[robertinventor]

Just at thought, at this resolution, you could probably do HOLOGRAPHS too :).

Real time ANIMATED HOLOGRAPHS.

Also of course the 3D specs idea, wearable head sets.

The idea of being able to vary the resolution of your display continuously up to some huge resolution is awesome.

We relay on cleartype at the moment to see many screens reasonably crisply. Presumably really high resolution displays would look much crisper.

If I look at my screen I'm using right now, with a critical eye - though it is much higher quality than my older screens, you can pick out the pixelation if you look carefully, e.g. for brackets (). With higher resolution it would probably look at least as good as a printed page in its crispness.

I think you can't really understand how much better it will be to have higher resolution displays until you can see them for real.

One thing it might do is make it easier for the eyes to focus exactly on the screen, and so reduce the tiredness of the eyes you get from long sessions at the computer.

Re:Also, why?

[robertinventor]

Sorry, digital ANIMATED HOLOGRAMS at 2540 dpi http://www.hasimages.com/images/footpixelchart.htm http://www.novavisioninc.com/pages/info_hologram_typesof.html Seems that 10 microns resolution at 2540 dpi is well beyond what you need for high quality holograms.

Re:Also weight. IMAX 3D is Dead.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.)

Point?

[steeleyeball]

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.

Re:Also weight. IMAX 3D is Dead.

[bill_mcgonigle]

Oh, that's clever - do you recall the company?

Good illustration about the true costs of war, though.

Mod parent up

[mrjb]

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.