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IBM Makes a Movie Out of Atoms
harrymcc writes "IBM's Almaden Research Center has a scanning tunneling microscope, a device invented by the company. It uses it to move individual atoms around — mostly for storage research. But it's created a 242-frame cartoon, A Boy and His Atom, using individual atoms as pixels. Guinness has certified it as the world's smallest movie."
242 frames, and ten 18-hour days of work by multiple people using a very tiny copper needle attached to an expensive machine to move the atoms around.
How does that translate into DPI???
According to this report, the movie depicts an area of 45 x 25 nanometers. I use the body of the stickman to approximate pixels, which gives me about 30 pixels in height. Which translates to 3 * 10^7 DPI. Which will be in your iPhone 71's über-retina display (assuming dpi grows exponentially). Although it's really debatable if your eye is capable of making use of such a high resolution.
Past a certain point, super-high resolution could get quite interesting: once your "pixel" structures get smaller than visible light wavelengths, you can use them to form interference patterns to not only control the brightness, but also the wavefront shape of transmitted light --- A.K.A. holograms. Then you get a "true" 3D display, which recreates the proper relation between binocular depth perception and how far out each eye is focused.