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MIT Develops Inexpensive Transparent Display Using Nanoparticles
rtoz writes "Researchers at MIT have come up with an innovative approach to creating transparent displays inexpensively, while providing wide viewing angles and scalability to large sizes. To create the transparent display, silver nanoparticles are embedded in plastic, tuned to scatter only certain wavelengths of light and to allow all other wavelengths through. In this example (video), it is tuned to scatter only blue color using 60nm silver particles. The researchers believe that it can be easily enhanced to a multicolor display by creating nanoparticles that can scatter other primary colors. The ability to display graphics and texts on an inexpensive transparent screen could enable many useful applications. For example, they could bring navigation data to windshields of cars and aircraft, and advertisements to the sides of skyscrapers. Cheap 'stick-on screens' could be developed using this technology. The messages broadcast on nanoparticle screens are accessible from virtually every angle. Transparent screens themselves are not new; for example, Google is working on Google glass. But they are expensive. This MIT invention will help to produce transparent displays easily and inexpensively."
Blue screen of death will have a whole new meaning if that pops up on your windshield.
The amount of silver in this is likely to be extremely small. They're nanoparticles for a reason. I doubt this'd stop adoption; a problem with scaling production is much more likely.
I'm sick of people coming up with these inventions that use some form of exotic material. Silver, gold, palladium, rhodium ... for God's sake, use something that is not an investment grade metal.
Considering the prices people pay for electronics, the raw materials are a tiny fraction of the cost. The quantities of these metals is likely no more than you're already getting in your $300 Samsung 27 inch monitor.
I for one would pay extra for something much cooler than ordinary LED, especially if I could stack them and get some cool 3D effect out of it. :P
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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Standard mirrors probably use much more silver than this.
According to the abstract, this is a projection screen only. They fill a transparent sheet with tuned nanoparticle subpixels, and they project monochrome light onto the subpixels that are tuned to the color of light they want. So, it still requires an external monochrome image projector with at least three times the resolution of the "transparent display". It'd be simpler to just fill a transparent sheet with *regular* silver particles and use a *regular* color projector. The science is cool but - as usual - impractical for this particular use
...is as a projector screen that is only reflective at one very specific wavelength. It doesn't emit any light...there are no pixels...nothing about it changes what parts light up.
It's still quite novel...i'm not sure why they couldn't be more specific (or less misleading?) in describing it.
Keep in mind it's not totally transparent - see how the table looks yellow behind it? Add red and greed and you're going to reduce the incoming light further. They said it can be tuned...so could be changed to avoid any of the peaks in LED, CFL, and daylight. Will be interesting to see where this goes...but if they start painting cars and buildings with this it's going to do odd things to the incoming light.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
I'm curious if this can display black. One big problem with AR glass displays is drawing the color black. This could be a big a pretty big deal for AR glasses!
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Stop being afraid of prices. If silver is $20/oz and one of these displays requires one thousandth of an ounce, then the cost of silver in one is two cents, so who cares?
Go figure out what the actual cost is and then you can figure out whether you need to engineer a suitable replacement 60nm (polar?) nano-organic for mass production.
We have plenty of silver on Earth - my god, you must've been locked in a closet in fear when everybody was running around with semi-disposable silver halite emulsions in their pockets.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Unfortunately this is just a projection screen that happens to only reflect the color blue, so only the outer layers would have an image projected on them. Your best bet for voxels would be sandwiched monochrome LCD.
Standard mirrors probably use much more silver than this.
Standard mirrors are generally "silvered" with aluminum.
Bit of historical trivia; when the Spanish arrived in the Americas silver and gold were very close in value to each other. The conquest of Mexico and Peru flooded the market with so much silver that the price dropped to 1/10th that of gold. There are altars in churches in Lima and Cusco (and probably in Mexico) made of half a ton of solid silver.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Stop hording all our good engineering materials because you foolishly think they have some worth just sitting there.
That occurred to me to, but I think it is a safe bet that a pane of glass will *always* be cheaper than glass plus nanoparticles plus circuitry and power. That being said, I'm sure there's a point where it'll eventually become cheap enough to make an entire storefront window out of it, and realise some benefit from the visuals over more traditional forms of advertisement.
Assuming storefronts still exist then, and assuming it becomes common to use, I'd move on to the main point. What's the big deal? Store windows basically are nothing *but* advertising...
Well, actually, what they were saying was that the actual display was a sheet of plastic stuck onto the glass. Meaning that you could retro-fit an existing window.
This could be even more interesting if it can be done as in the paperwhite displays, where the image consumes no power while static. You could then easily have your own programmable "stained glass" windows, Not to mention a new approach for automatically-shading windows.
Speaking of paperwhite displays, at least one major retailer has been peppering their stores with fairly sophisticated units, radio-updatable. So I doubt they'd balk at a reasonably-priced transparent display.
Times Square ever displayed goat.se?