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Stretching Crystals Promise Bendy, Full-Color Displays

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Fri Aug 24, 2007 10:57 AM
from the less-eye-stress dept.
Displays Science
NewScientist is reporting that a new approach to crystal formation could help create power-efficient, flexible color displays. These new photonic crystals, structured similar to opals, can be tuned by adjusting the gaps between the crystals. "The beauty of the device is that it can produce the whole spectrum of colors, even ultraviolet and infrared light, using only incident light. As a result, the expensive color filters used in every other color display on the market today, are no longer needed. And because the displays use only reflected ambient light, no power is wasted on back-lighting, as in today's mobile phones, for example. 'They can be viewed just as well in bright sunlight as in indoor light,' team member André Arsenault of the University of Toronto told New Scientist."
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Feed: Stretching crystals promises bendy, full-colour displays by nsfeed (1083229)
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  • Uhh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SighKoPath (956085) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:00AM (#20344681)

    They can be viewed just as well in bright sunlight as in indoor light
    What about in complete darkness? Gotta keep the basement-dwellers happy...

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by maino82 (851720)
      This is a very good point and I think it would be interesting if you integrate a photocell into the devices. When the photocell detects enough ambient light, you can turn the backlight off, but when there is no light, or very low light, you turn the backlight on, or possibly even dim it up and down. This way it can function in varying degrees of ambient light, but can also save a significant amount of energy.
      • I'm not sure that backlighting will work - since this is a reflective technology.

        • Re:Uhh... (Score:4, Interesting)

          by kebes (861706) on Friday August 24 2007, @12:38PM (#20345901) Journal

          I'm not sure that backlighting will work - since this is a reflective technology.
          It is indeed a reflective technology... but the non-reflective state is transparent rather than black (in the scientific paper they actual show an image in the off/transparent state). The most obvious way to use such a technology is against a black backing. In the 'off' state the entire display looks black, but you can then adjust pixels to be any bright color you want. By mixing the state of adjacent pixels you can presumably get a white color, or anything else.

          However the reflection effectively acts like an absorption if viewed transmissively. So if you had a backlight, you could tune the effective absorption band of each individual pixel. By cutting out a band of colors (and using adjacent pixels), you effectively have full color control.

          So it's possible to imagine a future version of this tech where the display is normally reflective (black backing) but when required switches to emissive display (which would require a backlight turning on, and inverting the logic of the display pixels so that the colors don't come out inverted). Thus you'd have the "best of both worlds."

    • Re:Uhh... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by timeOday (582209) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:09AM (#20344763)
      That's why these paper "books" will never catch on. No backlighting!

      From the blurb, this sounds like the holy grail: reflective, full color gamut, and flexible to boot. Of course we all know what happens to 99% of breakthrough technologies that should be ready for the market in 2-4 years...

      • Lack of backlighting on paper books is actually one reason I worked out a way to prop my laptop so I could read in bed. Plus, after I pass out, the screen turns itself off automatically!

        Now if they could just make ebooks suck less...

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by *weasel (174362)
          I'm sure there'll be an 'illuminator' ring built into the bezel by at least the second wave of backlight-free screens.
          There are just too many practical situations where it's convenient to be able to see your mobile screen in low-to-no ambient light situations.

          meetings/classes with a projector in use
          at the pub or theatre
          in bed
          outside at night
          in a car/plane/train at night
          etc.

      • From the blurb, this sounds like the holy grail
        and from the pamphlet [opalux.com] we find the rub: "Sub-second switching speed"

        So unless you're in the digital billboard industry, there's still alot more than 2-4 years of work to be done before it matters - if ever.
    • If you only mean visible light then this breakthrough has you covered!

      The beauty of the device is that it can produce the whole spectrum of colours, even ultraviolet and infrared light
      • Wouldn't it create even more atmosphere if you had to shine torches at the display to be able to see it? And anyone wanting to read an e-book under their covers with a torch could still do it

        • Wouldn't it create even more atmosphere if you had to shine torches at the display to be able to see it? And anyone wanting to read an e-book under their covers with a torch could still do it

          Is that an English torch or an American torch?

  • But I like the monitor being the only source of light in the room. How am I going to see the screen when I'm sitting like a mushroom in my dungeon/office with the lights off? This technology is a bummer.

    Unless we could make suits/coverings out of it that would display a video feed of what's behind you: active camouflage!

  • 1000 words (Score:3, Informative)

    by Verteiron (224042) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:05AM (#20344725) Homepage
    This story is worthless without pictures.

    There are none here, although there's no shortage of sales brochure style summaries:
    http://www.opalux.com/technologies.php [opalux.com]
  • Who else looked at their Technologies page and saw:

    Ela STINK

  • Sunblock required for computer users (Score:5, Funny)

    by LurkerXXX (667952) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:11AM (#20344783)
    "The beauty of the device is that it can produce the whole spectrum of colors, even ultraviolet and infrared light"

    Sweet, now we can get a virus on our computers that gives us sunburn.

    I wonder if Hawaiian Tropic will hire me as a blackhat to ensure they get increased sales from computer users. Maybe they'll introduce me to the girls.
    • I know it was a joke... but I'd just like to point out that the technology is a reflective display. When they say that they can tune it into the UV, this means that the pixels can be tuned so that they are highly reflective in the UV (and don't reflect any visible light).

      It's not emitting UV at you, it's just reflecting ambient UV. If you are outdoors, then some UV from the sun would be reflected off the display. If you take the display indoors, essentially no UV at all would be reflected since most light b
    • Yes, I know you're joking. But this is a reflective device, not emissive, so they can't make it any more dangerous to you than a mirror. Probably not any more dangerous than a sheet of paper.

  • hmm "infrared light based laptops!" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JustASlashDotGuy (905444) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:20AM (#20344885)
    I wonder if this would allow a soldier to use his laptop in the dead of night, viewing his screen via night-vision goggles? Anyone out there that's ever used night-vision goggles know if this even possible in the slightest?

    • Re:hmm "infrared light based laptops!" (Score:4, Insightful)

      by somersault (912633) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:49AM (#20345219) Homepage Journal
      Might be better just to use bluetooth or a short cabled connection to hook into the goggles.. unless night vision can amplify the screen in enough detail when it's getting so little ambient light on it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by xeromist (443780)
        Not to mention I'd prefer not to be emiting any more light than necessary, even in the infrared spectrum. All you'd need is an enemy with infrared vision and you might as well be using a regular laptop.
        • Yep that's what I was thinking too, but I think that army spec nightvision just amplifies light a lot rather than using a little IR flashlight type thing like you get on camcorders.
  • That's stopping this from reaching my home, anyway? This is the fifth year running that I've heard of "bendable displays", etc. - and I've yet to see a commercial product.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Cragen (697038)
      Indeed. We need some sort of "Popular Science Magazine" factor for this stuff. Say, rate it a PSM2 for "got a patent and looking for investors", or PSFx50 for, say, anything "recently discovered" anywhere or, perhaps, PS-BS=2^132 for anything with the words "fusion" or "nanotechnology" in the title. (Or perhaps a YARP or NARP factor ...with apologies to "Hot Fuzz")
    • Agreed. My first reaction when reading this was "oh great, another cool display idea that isn't coming to market.

      I'm still waiting for an OLED display that's bigger than the screen on my iPod.

      How about that projector that could work from a cellphone? (Or even my laptop!)

  • 1) What is the resolution of the device?

    2) What is the power consumption of the device? While I can already see there's no energy wasted on unnecessary back-lighting, how long could such a display be run off of, for example, a typical rechargeable battery?

  • From the product website (http://www.opalux.com/p-ink.php): ...
    5. Sub-second switching speed. ...

    So, it might be a while before this is useful for fast-changing displays, like TVs and computer displays.
    Might be ok for picture frames, outdoor signage and stuff.
  • From the company that is actually producing the technology [opalux.com], they list the technology as only having sub-second switching speed. That is not fast enough for monitors. Also, they only target the technology for large billboards or other outdoor displays, where the content is more static, and switching time might not be as critical.

  • Great, but now... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Overzeetop (214511) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:51AM (#20345257) Journal
    ...we all need to have calibrated room lighting in order to get the proper colors to show up. No blue with that 60w incandescent!

    Which brings me to...how does this work with fluorescent lighting? If you're using partial reflectivity, human eyes get the proper fractions of the constituents of the phosphors. If you're using interferometry, wouldn't you end up with huge dropouts in the visible spectrum?

  • Is this the last we'll hear of it??? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Twinbee (767046) on Friday August 24 2007, @12:05PM (#20345439) Homepage
    Is there anyone, anywhere on the web who ever tracks these technologies that are supposed to 'make it to the market soon'? I mean how about it. A site that finds out whether these new techs die, simmer down, or flourish.

    There are a billion and one news sites out there, each reporting thousands of 'just in' stories each day. To have just one that actually tracks the progress of each technology would be amazing. Give each tech their own special page, and then add to them as further news comes in about the SAME tech. Perhaps add a progress bar in the form of a percentage of expected market release too. Pretty please? I'm just getting sick and tired of hearing about these amazing new futuristic gadgets, and then never hearing about them again.

  • Two years == vaporware (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mark-t (151149) <markt&lynx,bc,ca> on Friday August 24 2007, @12:33PM (#20345841) Journal
    Okay, I admit it... I was suckered in at first... I actually thought "woah, what a cool idea!" But then I reread the article and there it was.... "available ... in as little as two years" (emphasis mine). Two years, it seems, is a small enough time to get people hyped up about something, but still far enough away that by the time two years is up most people will have forgotten about it. In other words, it's a great way to get funding for that's for a "product" that nobody will ever see.

    • Re:Ha! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Ed Avis (5917) <ed@membled.com> on Friday August 24 2007, @11:08AM (#20344753) Homepage
      The article says that if you can produce light of any frequency you don't need colour filters. But this can't be the case, because a computer display needs to mix different frequencies (to produce white light, for example). That said, if they can control the proportion of incident white light that is reflected as white rather than coloured to a single frequency (or narrow band of frequencies), and with a simple light/dark filter (such as a black and white liquid crystal display), it could make a display that works on hue-saturation-value rather than red-green-blue. That would be interesting for the computer world, which has used boring RGB values to store image data for so long. I know that JPEG stores chrominance and luminance separately but I'm not aware of any file format (let alone graphics hardware) which works using HSV.

      (BTW, does anyone know how to post a comment to an article using the new discussion system?)

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by jimstapleton (999106)
        except don't computer display all their colors by limiting any given spot to one frequency, and then altering the brightness of that spot. Specifically there are static spots for each pixel - one red, green and blue. Their frequencies remain, only their brightnesses change - and we get a lot of colors from them.

      • Re:Ha! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by somersault (912633) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:34AM (#20345035) Homepage Journal
        Presumably the only reason that we have to use pixels, are because we didn't have any material (or any cost effective method of manipulating a meterial) that could produce colours of any desired frequency (until now). So they just used single coloured phosphors that could be adjusted to different brightnesses of a single colour, and when mixed with 2 other colours, can fool the eye into seeing any colour. If you can just set the colour directly, why bother using 3 separate colours to fake it instead.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by somersault (912633)
          After thinking about it more, I see what you mean. Black, white and greys aren't colours in the visual spectrum, rather white needs to be made from a mix of other colours, and black is the absence of colour.. so simply being able to set a colour isn't enough, you need to control the brightness and still need to be able to mix different frequencies. So if you didn't have some kind of filter then you'd have a pretty weird looking display. Should have known better than to think a low /. id'er needed me to expl

        • But you see, we can't just create any color we want using only one wavelength. That's why all the color spaces seem to need at least three parameters: RGB, CMY, Lab, HSV, etc.

          For example, say you can pick any single wavelength you want, and you pick, oh, that bright "green laser" green #00FF00. How do you make it less saturated? How can it be a shade like celadon #FEFFFE (green but damn near white) or a shade like canned spinach #112211 (green but pretty dark)? Maybe you think you can do it by atten

          • Re:Ha! (Score:4, Informative)

            by TheRaven64 (641858) on Friday August 24 2007, @01:12PM (#20346357) Homepage Journal
            It's worth pointing out that RGB is an artefact of our retina, not our display technology. We have three different kinds of wavelength-specific sensors in our eyes which detect three fixed wavelengths (with some leakage to the sides). This is entirely a human thing; it is conceivable that a creature with a different evolutionary heritage might only have two wavelength sensors, or more than two.

            To accurately represent any given colour, you need an infinite number of values, not just three, since a colour is the sum of an arbitrary number of wavelengths of light. The red cones in our eyes, for example, detect light at around 580nm. If a photon with a wavelength of 590nm hits the red cone, then it is perceived as being a slightly weaker 580nm signal, rather than a different colour. This lets us fool our eyes into thinking they are seeing the full range of colours when they are only seeing three in a different wavelengths with different amplitudes. A species which saw colours properly would find it much harder to design a colour display.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              by fahrbot-bot (874524)
              it is conceivable that a creature with a different evolutionary heritage might only have two wavelength sensors

              Like Cows (or, I think, hooved animals in general). See either this week's episode of Mythbusters, or this paper, Principles of Cow Comfort, Animal Handling, and Movement [psu.edu]:

              Cows can see color; however they have dichromatic vision which means they see only a limited spectrum of colors. This makes a cow more sensitive to seeing sudden movement, but means they do not like situations with a high cont

      • Re:Ha! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by kebes (861706) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:59AM (#20345345) Journal
        These photonic crystals are being built into arrays of pixels, where each pixel can, effectively, control its reflection color. So, a pixel can set itself to 'black' by adjusting its reflection to be outside the visible range (in the IR or UV), or can set itself to 'red' by tuning itself to have a reflection in the red region of the spectrum. So each pixel can take on a continum of color values:

        (Black), Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, (Black)

        To generate a white reflection (or non-spectral colors, like brown), adjacent pixels would still have to do what we do in modern displays: one would be Red, the other Blue, the other Green, and your eye would see reflected white light. So in a certain sense it has the same pixel-clustering limitation of current displays.

        However it's better than current displays in some ways. First of all, if your image happens to be monochromatic (or parts of the display are monochromatic) then you don't have to be using three display pixels for a single image pixel... so in essence you can triple your display resolution. No doubt if such displays become common, algorithms will be developed that allow the display to maximize resolution when possible.

        Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the color range is greater. A typical display mixes Red, Green and Blue. But the wavelength of the Red, Green, and Blue that are available are inherently limited. This means that although the display can generate many colors, it doesn't actually cover the full color range of colors that your eye can see. With this proposed display, you can adjust the Red, Green, and Blue wavelengths themselves. This provides access to a wider color range. For instance, when this display sets itself to 'orange' it will be a pure spectral orange, rather than an approximation generated by mixing the right amount of red, green, and blue.

        And, of course, an obvious advantage is that this system is reflection-mode. Like paper, it doesn't generate light, merely reflects ambient light. This makes it ideal for reading outdoors, in natural light, etc.

      • This problem is nothing new, did you know that when they first introduced the 4 color cga monitors (well 16) they had to rescan all the porn from the green/amber version into the new 16 color format?

        There was even a time in the VGA era when you had black&white monitors (I had one), every porn website I visited I had to append B&W to the url (?monitorowner=cheapbastard), so I would get the black&white scans and not the colors ones. Once I forgot and my monitor blew up.

        What are you? STUPID?

        What

        • You didn't get it. White light is not any one frequency, but rather, all visible frequencies at equal intensity. The GP was not claiming that the entrenched RGB *ware was an obstacle to this new technology, but that either the article wasn't entirely clear on all the details (most likely) or that simple physics was an obstacle to this new technology.
      • You raise a good point about HSV. I was going to mention that a passive display which only reflects ambient like is going to be aesthetically much more pleasing to the eye: it will be like looking at a magazine instead of a TV screen. HSV also points to a greater similarity to printed imagery.

        I posted a comment to slashdot more than ten years ago about the potential of passive displays that only reflect ambient light, suggesting that there would be potential for display development. Glad to see my prog

    • Re:As usual (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Henneshoe (987210) on Friday August 24 2007, @11:53AM (#20345263)
      I see you have a +5 insightful, so this is for you and everyone who agrees with you. Get out of the /. science section if you do not want to hear about this stuff till it hits market. Two years from now if this display is good enough to be sold, you can read about it in /. hardware. Many of us enjoy hearing of new discoveries even if they may never make it to market.
      • Thank you. I get so tired of those same comments all the time. Whatever happened to a slashdotter's sense of wonder and imagination? Have years and years of scifi not left some kind of impression, some ability to be excited by the possibilities, instead of just whining about one thing or another? Sheesh.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by kebes (861706)
      I appreciate your desire for real technology rather than vaporware. However this recent publication is interesting scientifically even if it doesn't pan out into useful technology.

      Having said that, I would like to point out that this design idea is further along than many (most?) of the "display tech of the week" articles we read. In particular, in the actual scientific paper they show working prototype systems with multi-pixel displays. Their devices, while prototypes, have realistic parameters: 0.3 mm

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