Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > June > 03 > Entry
Displaying the future… of displays
What kinds of images will you be staring at for hours on end in the next five years or so?
Whatever they are, they’ll be displayed on devices that are: thinner, lighter, perhaps flexible, more saturated in life-like color, and which use less power.
That’s the message to take away from The Society for Information Display’s International Symposium, Seminar and Exhibition, held Sunday through Friday in San Antonio.
In a large expo hall at the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center, tech giants like Samsung, LG Electronics, 3M and Corning displayed their wares along with many smaller companies in areas including electronic ink; sharper, thinner displays; 3-D technology that will eventually make its way into living rooms and all the LEDs, glass, sensors and other supply-chain hardware that makes all that happen.
So, what does the future look like? It’s crisp. OLED technology, which provides a dazzling, color-rich image but has so far been expensive and limited in size in the consumer market, is going to get bigger and more ubiquitous as the technology matures. So-called “Solid-state displays” will be a “Radical shift” from the LCD displays that are currently in vogue, said Tom Miller, executive director of SID.
It might also be a piece of the puzzle for creating much-buzzed-about flexible displays. One folding OLED on display shown on the floor could be used like a wallet with images displaying on both sides.
How thin can these things get? Samsung’s giant booth showed off a “Flapping OLED Panel.” A small fan shot a breeze at a cell-phone-sized display of flowers. The screen was the breadth of a human hair; it literally fluttered in the breeze.
Energy-saving displays were also a big theme of the show. Flat-panel displays are notorious energy guzzlers, but a new generation of primarily LED-powered TVs and monitors will use less energy by more efficiently dimming parts of the screen that don’t need brightness. Regular displays were compared side-by-side with these greener TVs which used about a third of the energy, some fewer than 20 watts compared to TVs that consume close to 60 at a time.
LG’s “World’s Greenest TV” concept display was a 47-inch TV with a stunning picture, but the most green thing about it was what wasn’t in there: six hazardous materials including lead, mercury and cadmium that were jettisoned to create an Earth-friendly screen.
3-D has already become a staple in theaters, but its future in our living rooms is much fuzzier.
“There’s an awful lot of interest to come up with technologies in 3-D that don’t require the glasses,” said Paul Drzaic, president of SID, who gave the American-Statesman a tour of the expo floor. He acknowledged that the technology is not as far along as with-glasses 3-D, but, “I’ll tell you, this is immensely better than it was even two years ago.”
3-D sans-glasses, as in one large display shown by LG, is not nearly as impressive as you might imagine. The viewing range is very limited and the 3-D is more like the old “Magic Eye” illusions than the kind of jump-out-of-the-screen experience you’d get from “Monsters vs. Aliens” in a theater wearing 3-D glasses. But the technology is improving and eventually, it’ll be in our homes, Drzaic said, although it may take longer than the theater transition because broadcasters are involved.
What else was cool? Universal Display showed off a wearable, flexible display, a kind of giant wrist watch (more like a Wonder Woman-like cuff) that showed a curved image. Clunky, but neat.
Back at the Samsung booth, a tiny 2-inch S-curved display was so lovely, Stevie Wonder should write a song about it. Right next to that one, a transparent display showed a woman doing yoga while a white Teddy Bear behind the screen was clearly visible through the glass. And two feet away, a driver’s license with a moving mug shot was like something out of Harry Potter, but Muggle-friendly.
Multi-touch, the technology that lets you pinch photos on an iPhone or do two-finger gestures on a trackpad, was featured on large monitors and with more capabilities. Bordeaux, France-based Stantum showed off pressure-sensitive touchscreen technology. And 3M introduced “10-finger touch,” in which 10 individual fingers can each be tracked on a 19-inch display. It’ll be available to developers for the upcoming Windows 7 operating system. More efficient finger painting, anyone?
Microvision’s PicoP Projector was impressive, even if it was hard to find the tiny devices in the shadowy booth with dim lighting: the small, cell-phone-sized projector uses lasers to project an image that can be displayed at practically any distance without refocusing. Because of its unique properties, an image of a human face could be projected on a white dummy head with no distortion. It was pocket-sized and amazing. An accessory projector should be out this summer in the $500 range, but this kind of technology will eventually find its way into phones and digital cameras.
Microvision’s PicoP Projector, hooked up to a cell phone. Very cool display quality handled with lasers instead of LEDs.
Then there was E-Ink Corp., which blew me away with a color e-book prototype, a flexible display no thicker than a laminated piece of paper and large-form e-ink displays that would make for low-power, high-contrast signage. Maybe I’m swayed by the newspaper industry’s need for technology like this, but if the future of e-books is as colorful and flexible as what I saw at SID, and if it gets here soon enough, the future might not be so grim for this industry after all.
I’ve got lots of good video footage, too, but not enough time to edit it; it’ll be up later this week. Lots of cool stuff, I promise!
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Gadgets, Internet, Movies & DVDs, Phones, TV, Videogames
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By Steve Ringgenberg
June 29, 2009 6:47 PM | Link to this
Omar has got to have one of the best jobs in mass media. This story is so cool. The technologies on display here are beyond cutting edge. They are science fiction made real. I can't wait to see what comes next in the next 5 years.
By Wright Bryan
June 4, 2009 7:59 AM | Link to this
Cool stuff! It's like you've been to the future and back.