The company gave demos of a 5-tile panel outdoor display, using a
smartphone to control the content scrolling across the top side of its booth.
Each panel was powered by solar panels from the ambient light in the convention
center, and we were told required less than one percent of the total display
space. – Steve Sechrist
Display Week 2018 Daily Show News
Monday, June 4, 2018
E Ink’s Large-Format Single-Segmented Solar-Powered Display
Friday, May 25, 2018
So You Think You Know Liquid Crystals....
Let’s play a game. Tell me how you would finish this
sentence: “Liquid-Crystal Display Technology is…”
Amazing – OK, but can you be more specific?
Great for TVs, phones,
tablets, computer displays, etc. – Sure is! And just about every other
application you can name as well. During the opening comments for the LCD 50th anniversary technical session at Display Week 2018, SID President Helge Seetzen
commented that LCD technology has paved the way for the ubiquitous penetration
of displays into virtually every possible application.
Complicated – Yup. Over the last 50 years, dozens of different areas of science and technology
had to converge to make what we have today. While most innovations build on a
previous foundation, LCDs are somewhat unique in that developers had to mostly build
their own foundations as the technology evolved from those first demonstrations
of the electro-optic effect of dynamic-scattering liquid crystal by inventor
George Heilmeier at RCA in 1968.
Rocket science? –
No, maybe not that complicated, but let’s come back to that.
Based on vegetables
– Huh? What? OK, well actually yes that’s true - carrots specifically. While
LCD technology is now 50 years old, the first discovery of the materials now
classified as “liquid crystals” dates back 130 years to 1888, when scientists
at Merck in Germany first identified a compound extracted from carrots that
exhibited physical properties not yet seen. Merck first started offering liquid-crystal
materials for scientific study at the turn of the 20th century but
it wasn’t until the 1960s that people started looking at them for this type of
application.
Resilient – For
sure! Over the last 50 years, countless development efforts have evolved the
technology from its simple roots in passive-matrix monochrome twisted-nematic
mode text displays. During the 1970s and 1980s, critical advancements such as
rubbing to establish alignment, passive- and active-matrix addressing to control
pixel arrays, and super-twist and dual-domain modes all helped improve viewing
angles and contrast to a point where the technology really began to show
promise. Along the way, amorphous-silicon and poly-silicon technologies were
also developed to support the practical fabrication of TFTs. By the 1990s LCDs
were starting to find practical application in places such as avionics and
eventually they became a critical component in the evolution of laptop
computers. But there were still many performance limitations to overcome, such
as response time, color gamut, viewing angle, etc.
While LCDs performed well and were crucial to laptops, CRTs
were well established as the performance standard for televisions, and a lot
more development was needed to make large-screen LCDs that could compete. In
the next decade, countless innovations such as overdrive, faster switching and
higher frame rates, additional LCD modes such as VA and IPS, copper electrodes,
dual-side drive, and many more all converged to displace CRTs, and achieve
never-before-seen television screen sizes. Along the way came the iPhone and
the enabling of a whole new class of consumer devices built around the LCD
screen. At each milestone, a new
threshold of performance has been challenged, and the industry continues to
evolve today with quantum-dot backlights, glass-based light guides, 4K and 8K
resolutions, stereoscopic viewing, and many more innovations that were shown in
Display Week’s 2018 exhibition.
Unlikely – Maybe. Consider
what might have happened if the early pioneers of LCD technology had foreseen
all the development work that lay ahead and problems that had to be solved from
1968 to today. Would they have taken it on? Of course they would have! As I
listened during the sessions from pioneers including Martin Schadt, Fan Lou,
Koji Suzuki, Kenji Okaoto, Injae Chung, Jon Souk, Mark Verrall, Terry Scheffer,
and William Doane, I could still hear the passion in their voices and the love
of the challenge they had taken part in.
I wonder what their business leaders might have said if they
had all sat down in one room around 1990 and assessed what was ahead of them: Investments
measured in the tens of billions of dollars to develop the technical and
manufacturing infrastructure. A market place that almost immediately oscillated
between over and under-supply and invoked commodity-style pricing pressures.
Products with unique capabilities but limited to certain key markets. Consistent
and relentless competitive pressure at every turn. Would they have decided to
move forward? Certainly several early entrants did not choose to move forward,
and others took up the challenge along the way and became dominant players. But,
looking across the entire span of 50 years, that would have been a big risk to
take for anyone and a great test of vision and courage! Congratulations and much
respect goes to those who did see this future and fought hard for it.
So is it rocket science? In some ways it certainly feels like
it. While LCDs are not literally as complicated as the space shuttle, their
development has employed what might be a similar order of magnitude of
engineers and scientists, and probably crosses the boundary to almost as many
science and technology disciplines. It has clearly occupied a similar timespan
in human history as modern space programs, and LCDs have literally travelled
beyond earth’s orbit and might even be on rovers on other planets today.
I just want to say what a privilege it was to hear these
great speakers talk so passionately about their work and to attend the wonderful
program so well organized here at Display Week 2018 -- Stephen Atwood
Full Throttle on the Show Floor
Practically every large display manufacturer showcased
automotive panels at Display Week. Two trends were obvious: Pillar-to-pillar
dashboard displays and bended/curved ones. The picture below shows a demo from Visionox
that integrates two convex displays in the steering wheel.
The monitor on the
right acts as a visualization of the rear-view camera, while the left display switches
between operational data and touch control for an infotainment system.—Karlheinz Blankenbach
Cool, Color-Reflective Watch Display from CLEARink
At its Display Week booth, electrophoretic display (EPD)
company CLEARink, showed a color, video-rate, reflective watch display. The
company noted the significant improvements in its display's specifications
since last year.
The current watch-display prototype has a 16:1 contrast
ratio, improved color gamut, 202-dpi resolution, and 35 percent reflectance for white. As
expected with this technology, the display is sunlight readable.
The display uses a matrix color filter, which has produced
poor reflectivity and color gamut in older EPD implementations. CLEARink's
EPD approach produces a more reflective monochrome display, which results in a
significantly brighter color display when the color filter is added.
The company anticipates having displays in customer products
by early 2019. – Ken Werner
CLEARink has improved all of its significant display
specifications over the last year to produce this bright, colorful
reflective display. Photo: Ken Werner
Display Week Keynotes from Key Industry Leaders
One of the early
highlights from each Display Week is the keynote session on Tuesday morning.
This year we heard from Visionox CEO Deqiang Zhang; Douglas Lanman, Director of
Computational Imaging at Oculus Research; and Nobel Laureate Hiroshi Amano,
Director at the Center for Integrated Research of Future Electronics.
Dr. Zhang gave
an enthusiastic overview of OLED technology and the market as well as a brief
history of OLED development. He predicts an upcoming Golden Age of OLED
adoption as a key driver in a world where displays are ubiquitous. Zhang provided
a nice review of the past and present direction of OLED technology, future
capacity, and applications. According to Dr. Zhang, the adoption and spread of
OLEDs depend on collaboration across upstream and downstream partners –
materials developers, equipment vendors, panel makers, system integrators and
customers. A key to OLED development depends on reducing cost as well as
bringing up new technology. Cost reduction is realized by building faster
machines, better automation, and improved processes. As any CEO must, Dr. Zhang
presented a positive outlook on the future of his business and of OLED
technology as a driver of a display-centric future.
Dr. Lanman offered
us some wonderful insight into the creative process at Oculus Research in its
goal to deliver a “reactive display” – that is, a display that can mimic the
behavior of the human visual system in a VR application. Oculus wants to
deliver a visual experience that is realistic and comfortable for the user. Lanman
showed us various ideas that were tried and tweaked to varying levels of
success, including a mechanical varifocal display and eye tracking. The best
technical solution was a “focal surface” display that uses a spatial light
modulator in the viewing optics that delivers quite promising results. Oculus
wants to do more than open a window on virtual reality – it wants us to be able
to walk through the door.
Dr. Amano
reviewed advances in LED materials and illumination technology and his
contributions in these areas. These advances have made (and will continue to
make) significant impacts to society and modern life because of a vast increase
in the efficiency of LED light sources compared to other lighting solutions.
These advances are leading to tremendous reductions in energy consumption and will
enable increased quality of life for people with limited access to the
electricity grid.
The Automotive Community Gathers at Display Week 2018
For the first time ever, the Automotive/Vehicular Displays
and HMI Subcommittee invited the automotive community attending SID's Display
Week to a luncheon during show. This event was co-sponsored by Harman/Samsung
and the German Flat Panel Forum (DFF), and was well attended.
Participants enjoyed interesting small talk about the
automotive presentations and demos on the show floor, and these discussions among
peers led to new insights and opinions.
The picture below shows a few of the people at the
luncheon, with Rashmi Rao, chair of the Automotive/Vehicular Displays and HMI Subcommittee
on the right. – Karlheinz Blankenbach
Thursday, May 24, 2018
Personal Stereoscopic Cinema Comes to the I-Zone
In the I-Zone this year was a patented technology using “nonparaxial
axis optics” that delivers a 3D experience without the passive polarizing
glasses, or the active-LC shuttering more commonly used.
Called a personal stereoscopic cinema device, the technology
was shown earlier this year at the ICDT International conference in Guangzhou and
made it to the I-Zone exposition this year. It came from a development
initiative under Dr. Ding Shou-qian (shown below), and China’s 4G/5G communication initiative
with the promise of high-definition, full color, and high brightness with quasi-naked
eye stereoscopic display.
Dr Ding said his purely optical system can reach 4K-level
output, and the system shown at the exhibition used a dual screen with a
resolution of 2560 x 1440 -- impressive. --Stephen
Sechrist
Advanced Automotive Prototypes from Tianma
A large portion of the exhibits on the show floor at
Display Week this year were automotive displays or technology related to automotive
displays. The picture below shows John Brown, automotive CEO of Tianma and new
member of SID's Subcommittee for Automotive Displays and HMI, in front of some of
Tianma’s latest automotive prototypes. These displays include features such as local
dimming, narrow borders, and free-form design. Advanced HUD displays with about
20 percent higher transmission and contrast ratio and a chance to “ride” in a
car model with a full-sized dashboard display, center console display, and rearview
“mirror” display made a visit to Tianma’s booth worthwhile. --Karlheinz Blankenbach
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
The Secret to Obtaining Investment in Your Project Is Revealed
The quest for the unknown drives all of us at Display Week. A passion for changing the future of the
display industry is in our DNA. To support these endeavors, we need funding,
and so guidance in obtaining investment was a major topic in the Business
Conference at Display Week 2018.
The “normally” important issues of market, technology,
uniqueness, and prototyping were considered but largely set aside as not being the
main drivers.
Stephen Saltzman told us the secret that drives a VC or
Private Equity Group to invest in your vision and passion: Investors need to get to know you and then
talk in depth with your suppliers and future customers. If the suppliers and
future customers are excited about making you successful, then you are a good
investment.
If the people around you are not interested in your
success and are not personally motivated to see you realize the business, investors
walk away.
Each of us must realize building a passionate support
team excited about our success signals great confidence to investors. – Gary Feather
Virtual and Augmented Reality in Display Week 2018
Display Week 2018, the annual conference organized by the
Society for Information Display (SID), is underway in the Los Angeles
Convention Center. This year’s conference features a special track on virtual
and augmented reality (VR/AR) technologies and applications. This is quite
timely, given the rapid developments on this topic in recent years, as evidenced
by the increasing number of companies introducing new products, as well as
universities offering specialized courses on the associated technologies.
The VR/AR special track in this year’s conference included a
keynote speech delivered by Doug Lanman from Facebook Research Labs, a short
course taught by this author, a seminar presented by Robert Konrad from
Stanford University, several talks in the market focus conference, an extensive
array of technical papers in the symposium, and a number of live demonstrations
in the Exhibit Hall.
VR/AR devices promise exciting immersive experiences in the
areas of gaming and entertainment, education, tourism, and medical
applications, to name a few. The state-of-the-art results presented and
demonstrated at Display Week this year are bringing the virtual- and augmented-reality
experience ever closer to reality. While you are the event, be sure to get a first-hand
experience. As the character Morpheus in the much-acclaimed 1999 movie The Matrix says, “Unfortunately no one
can be told what the matrix is -- you have to see it for yourself!” – Achin Bhowmik
Tuesday, May 22, 2018
The Science of the Bend in Flexible Displays
At this year’s SID/DSCC Business Conference at Display Week,
KAIST Professor Beyong-Soo Bae gave a comprehensive presentation on the science
of the bend in flexible displays. Dr. Bae highlighted the different types of
foldable techniques, including variations on in-folding, out-folding, multiple
sliding, and rolling. His presentation covered the benefits and challenges of
each and then went into the math behind creating a metric for bending stiffness
to create what KAIST calls 1/Flexibility.
This is defined in the image below and follows the primary
axiom that a thinner film and module will yield reduced elongation and bending
stiffness.
Key issues to consider during folding include inside
compression and outside tension,
elongation, and restoring force leading to bending stiffness
in select folding modalities (out-folding vs.
in-folding, for example).
KAIST needed to consider where the fold in the display
occurs, the distance from the neutral plane, and the radius of the curvature of
the display. Dr. Bae said that this work was augmented by prior work done by
IMID.
To deal with the unique material science challenges bendable
displays impose, KAIST created a spin-off company, Solip Technologies, now
headed by Dr. Bae. His presentation
highlighted the company’s focus on bendable display solutions to help get us to
bendable display nirvana. -- Stephen
Sechrist
High-Dynamic Range and Artificial Intelligence Stand Out in Display Week Monday Seminars
Monday, May 21, saw the continuation of Display Week
educational opportunities, as experts in various fields shared from the fruits
of their expertise in a series of 90-minute seminars. Two notable examples
stood out. One was given by Dolby Laboratories engineers Timo Kunkel and Rob
Wanat, who gave a very good seminar titled “High-Dynamic-Range: A Consumer
Ecosystem.” The second was another excellent offering from Achin Bhowmik called
“Artificial Intelligence: Image Recognition and Visual Understanding.”
Yes, I know that Dolby has a point of view regarding HDR.
And yes, it has a proprietary scheme for handling HDR content as part of its
licensing business model. But its seminars and papers are always well presented
and backed up by good research done by knowledgeable engineers. The speakers energized
their talk with a description of how the human visual system sees the world and
responds to high-dynamic range scenes in the real world. This informs its
approach of how to best acquire, deliver, and display HDR content. Kunkel and
Wanat built a good case for the Dolby Perceptual Quantizer as embodied in SMPTE
2084 as a good way to encode EOTF for HDR displays. It will be interesting to
see how HDR continues to evolve as displays improve and HDR standards and
pipelines are developed.
Achin Bhowmik delivered another great talk with his primer
on AI as applied to image recognition. He gave a brief history of AI and the
breakthroughs that resulted in image-recognition performance that surpassed
that of humans a few years ago. This was enabled by using programming
techniques inspired by human brain physiology, advances in computing, and the
availability of lots of image data for training the algorithms. He gave us a
basic understanding of how “deep” neural networks are trained with some simple
examples. In addition to recognizing image content, neural networks can also be
trained to achieve semantic scene understanding. See the “black and white dog
jumps over bar” above, for an example of a scene recognized and described via
AI. There is a lot of potential for AI
and many organizations are making some big bets on its continued development.
There’s still a bit of work to do, however, before I would be comfortable
letting AI drive my car or fly my plane. I do appreciate those email spam
filters, though… -- Tom Fiske
At a Theater Literally Near You: Samsung’s New 4K LED Onyx Screen
Last night I saw Avengers:
Infinity War on one of the new Samsung 4K LED “Onyx” screens at the Pacific
Theatres Winnetka in Chatsworth, California, just north of Los Angeles. This is
one of just 4 Onyx screens out of an installed base of 188,000 digital DLP
Theaters across the US.
The screen is 35 feet across and the results are amazing! Blacks
are jet black; colors are brilliant. This is a must see!
Those nearly 200,000 digital DLP theaters represent a seismic figure of $20
billion in terms of replacement opportunities over the next 15 years. During this
time, the 4K LED technology will be improved even more, and costs will drop
dramatically. – Gary Feather
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