What is a reasonable time to see this in my next phone? 2020? Looks really cool, with the screen being the biggest battery hog I hope to see a bump in battery lasting through the day (otherwise we get thinner phones).
It won't be on your phone by 2020. It is not clear whether it will ever be on your phone. The iphone 8 has about 3 million subpixels which will all have to be individually cut, tested and assembled on a display for a microled to work.
Or, alternatively, the display can be made from a whole wafer, which will cost about a thousand dollars for the raw materials and perhaps $5k for the finished display.
I know technology tends to advance a lot, but the advances required for microled to work seem really far fetched. Also, display technology does not advance as quickly as digital computation technology. Remember we have been talking about OLEDs for at least 20 years now and they are only now becoming mainstream.
This technology, if it ever works, will be for very small devices where brightness is very important but resolution is not that important. So smart glasses and smart watches. Even for those applications it is not at all certain that they will be able to bring the cost down sufficiently.
I'm actually most excited by the transparency. If we get low-cost transparent displays, it will finally make
finally make Ishii's clearboard an affordable possibility for remote collaboration.
The transparency aspect is so cool! They look like they'd be awesome for AR goggles, although I don't know enough about the optics to know if that'd be feasible. We may also be close to getting those Star Trek style clear displays! Exciting stuff.
I was actually wondering recently if you could do something like that with a small off-the-shelf TFT screen.
ILI9341 modules are less than $5 each, and have 16/18-bit color with typical resolutions of 240x320. You can separate the actual panel from its backlights and casing without damaging it if you're careful, so I was thinking of trying to maybe put one in a box for a sort of DIY projector or something.
But I'm also pretty sure there's some reason why it won't work; maybe the glass is too polarized, maybe the colors are too dim, etc.
The panel will filter the incoming light; these displays emit light. With high transparency panels you could get something that works well when there is an external light source, although with worse color distorsion.
People have been modding old overhead projectors with LCD screens for as long as universities have been throwing both away (so since early 2000s). Here is a recent example[0]. For some reason nobody seems to realise that you can just place a smarphone underneath it and use that. I mean, the principle is the same as this video[1] :P
I just got myself an abandoned one - the Karolinska Institute, where I work, is moving, and they are throwing away a lot of crap. I took one of the overhead projectors, stripped out the old 240 Watts lamp + cooling unit (to be replaced with a less energy-draining yet brighter LED panel from the inside. Perhaps even one of those that can be programmed to change colors).
I've built an AR headset with a normal backlit LCD, fresnel lens, and a semi-transparent mirror. Not great but it works.
You can certainly build a DIY projector that way. Building a high quality projector is hard but a crappy one is very simple. If you jam an LCD between a light source and a lens at the right distances you will get an image. Slide projectors, camera lenses, magnifying glass lenses, even those fresnel page magnifier lenses work.
A phrase in the article made me look up the price of raw silicon wafers, but although there are articles mentioning scarcity and 20% price hikes in 2017 (e.g. https://semiengineering.com/silicon-wafers-ma-and-price-hike... ), they are rather coy about actual values.
I'm not sure I see the "revolutionary" aspect of this. With displays, you don't need to make power consumption arbitrarily small. By Amdahl's law, you only need to make it a small percentage of the cpu (and wireless) consumption. In this respect, Sharp's transflective displays (that were found, for example, in the pebble watches,) were already resolving the power issue in the context of smartwatches.
Combine this with 10 or 20% savings in CPU energy, 10 or 20% savings in radio power, 10 or 20% in RAM energy for example, and you start getting into revolutionary use cases. We're now looking seriously at embedded small devices that can sit in one place, take up the space of a pack of cards, and transmit useful data over the course of 20 years. Now we start getting into revolutionary because this opens up applications like building moisture detectors into roof construction, embedding a screen into the back side of your front door that shows a log of when it was opened or closed, or maybe something surprising like color changing shoes.
The revolution is in the amount of time the display can be on, and the amount of data it can display 24/7. That is currently the big knock on most smartwatches - you have to move your wrist to activate the display and see the time. If that barrier is removed, it is revolutionary.
Both of the Android (WearOS I guess now) smart watches that I've personally used have had always on displays and 2-3 day battery life. Maybe this is just an iWatch or whatever it's called problem? It does seem like whenever I see one of those mini iPhones strapped to someone's wrist it's blank.
"Most smartwatches"? I can think of only one, and that's the primary reason I have a Garmin instead of an Apple Watch. Other than Apple, I can't think of another smart watch that requires one to make a wrist motion in order for the time to be displayed.
My original Samsung Galaxy Gear (that I used literally once, lol) had this "feature". You had to do a douchey motion to see the time, and it often missed your motion so you'd have to do it again.
I knew I'd never actually use it but was hoping it'd be relatively hackable and I'd think of a use case for it. That never eventuated.
Firstly, these displays promise brighter colors and a wider gamut.
Secondly, you only get long battery life in a small package one tiny step at a time, and you want them, either to increase battery life or to make smaller watches. The latter is particularly hard. A typical smart watch is around 10 mm thick, nowadays, 2 or so of which are taken by the display and the back panel. So, if you want to make it 8 mm thick, you lose 25% of inner volume and, ballpark, the same on battery volume (taking into account that the battery is shielded, likely closer to 30%)
Finally, I’m not sure that transflective display is that low power if you want to frequently update the display. Looking at the data sheet of https://eu.mouser.com/new/Sharpsma/sharpmemorylcd/, page 14 lists power use of 15 μW on a static display, 50 μW on a display that updates at 1 Hz. Extrapolating, I get 2115 μW at 60 Hz, or about 2 mW. The capacity of a typical smartwatch battery is less than 1 Wh, so that display could display video for 500 hours or 20 days (rounded up a few times)
Wider gamut is what might be the differentiator here.
With respect to power consumption, the video codec would probably draw more than 100mW [1], and at that point, the 2mW display consumption would not matter.
The display i mentioned is 144x168. 640x480 is over 12 times as many pixels. _if_ decoding scales by #pixels, that would move that 71 mW down to around 6 mW.
Still larger, more so if you go to 30 Hz or higher, but there is no silver bullet if you want a smaller watch or longer battery life.
Even assuming a CPU that would only consume 6 mW when decoding video, and nothing else (DRAM, wireless) draining power, then (at 15fps) the display is only drawing 0.5 mW, or 1/12-th of the CPU power consumption. Even if you were to assume a display that draws no power, that would only increase battery life by 8%. A more realistic estimate would be 1% to 2%. Nothing revolutionary about that.
Somewhere, there's an engineer saying to him/herself "we could use a low-energy CPU in this design, but there's no point because its power consumption is insignificant compared to the display".
There was a time where I’d get super hyped when reading these kinds of promises. Transparent displays, foldable screens. Truth is, we’ve been seeing working prototypes at events like CES for more than 15 years. I’ve come to realize the mechanics of these companies are similar to the car industry. New technologies are presented for the same reason car companies present strange concept cars: PR
The weird thing is that we already have “foldable screens.” But all the phone makers have done with them is to give us slightly less bezel on our glass rectangles.
I’m wondering if this is a “flying car” thing—if actually handing consumers ultra-thin bendable (but not actually creasable) panels would be a dumb idea, because consumers would try to exceed their tolerances and break them too easily.
(This is also, I think, why we don’t see more optical cabling standards outside of the enterprise space. The average consumer can’t be trusted to install a glass-fibre cable run without breaking it; and when they break it, they’ll get angry, because glass-fibre cables still cost a lot of money. And plastic-fibre cabling, though more tolerant, is far less of an improvement over copper, especially in attenuation distance.)
I'm not convinced about rollable or foldable displays. My phones screen is reachable with one hand, any bigger and I have to use two hands. So I use my tablet. If I need to get work done I use a PC or laptop.
I don't see the point of a display that folds. The display would be worse than any I currently own. It would be more prone to breakage due to the nature of what you're asking it to do.
I think it's one of those technologies that sounds neat, but in reality is not that useful (like 3D tvs)
I don't even think it sounds that neat. Just silly.
3D TV's, on the other hand, I love and am very sad that they're now not being produced... Just when the size and resolution of TVs is getting good enough to make them worthwhile.
Maybe it was the content, but what I saw on 3D tv was just flat characters in a 3d environment. It felt very weird. The clunky glasses were a bit rubbish. All a bit weird and crap.
I must say using foldable displays to have 2 display sizes does seem very useful to me. If you can ignore the blatant cheesyness and sexism this video does illustrate it pretty well.
People will crease them anyway, accidental or otherwise.
Flexible displays are far too fragile to be practical except in applications where they're literally bent only once and then affixed to something for the rest of their life.
>The weird thing is that we already have “foldable screens.” But all the phone makers have done with them is to give us slightly less bezel on our glass rectangles.
Also, aren't they used for curved TV screens and computer monitors?
Sure, these displays are bendable. But they have a zero Gaussian curvature everywhere. What would be really interesting is to build a flat panel display that has a non-zero Gaussian curvature at will, e.g. one that fits into the windshield of a car.
There is a catch that programming these displays require one to learn differential geometry as a prerequisite.
So are you saying that you want an actual foldable phone? Putting aside the technical challenges of getting the chassis and other components to also fold, I struggle to understand why this would be a desirable product.
These might be good for pro photographers, though right now I'd rather see affordable 300dpi A4-sized e-book reader with tablet pen and SD card slot to get rid of all my paperwork.
I used to have 300dpi Kindle Voyage so I know where my threshold with e-ink lies. 220dpi is on my 4k monitor, which is fine from 3ft/1m but not closer.
This looks quite promising. However, I'm burned a few too many times buying and trying to use tablets for drawing.
I had the iliad, a Dutch tablet in the very early days of e-paper. Slow, unworkable latency in drawing, buggy software, low support for digital book formats. I tried a few other e-paper devices since then, but they didn't improve on a lot.
The Microsoft Surface 2 seriously improved on this space. But it was still not feeling well - still too much lag. And then there is the huge problem that Windows is not suitable for tablets - it's a nightmare to work with compared to Android.
Surface 3 got it right enough, the feel is good enough to do some serious drawing on it. Microsoft OneNote is pretty much ideal for many usecases but has its cases where it becomes unbearingly slow. I have not yet tried the Surface 4 or the iPad Pro.
The ideal of an android device with a OneNote version which supports plugins and an app-store on a color latencyless e-paper display is still a decade away it seems.
Foldable screens have been real and orderable for several years.
There problem is, screens need a protective layer on top, and bendable glass tech hasn't caught up. You need to be able to embed a touch layer, have good optical clarity, be scratch resistant, and impart resistant.
I've, gently, played with production ready bendable LCDs. Then realized that they weren't practical for any of the sci-fi scenarios I had imagined.
What about just curved displays? Like in a car, it seems there could be some interesting applications (screen embedded in windshield, or wrapped around the dashboard or center console). Is curved glass tech also a barrier, because I feel I've seen very few applications of curved displays other than TV's.
This is what I don't get. It's entirely possible that I'm particularly unimaginative, but I can't even think of any devices with screens I'd want to bend. All of my devices bend exactly as much as I want them to: none (or at least negligibly).
> How about a 75' TV you can carry around like a scroll.
It'd be a rather thick scroll. :)
The problem of break-ability again comes to mind.
The use case is niche. All the electronics for control still have to be there, so it isn't featherweight or anything, and it is not exactly pocket sized, and now the screen is really fragile.
I don't understand in general why OLED is taking so long to be mass produced for TVs and monitors. It's like just now becoming mainstream, with what seems like two actually purchasable products.
I have an LG OLED TV, and I would recommend against purchasing an OLED for monitor use.
Burn-in is still a huge issue. I've used mine for about a year and the red channel is full of distracting burn-in patterns from still elements on my screen from things like wallpapers, tiled window borders, taskbar/docks, HUDs from games, etc.
Does anyone know if MicroLEDs could suffer from burn-in as well? I.e. do they also degrade over time based on usage?
I don't have any knowledge of LEDs, but I believe that the burn in problems in OLEDs are due to them wearing out due to them being organic, which presumably wouldn't affect artificial micro leds
Me too! I was so hyped up about it that I got myself a ThinkPad X1 Yoga with an OLED display. But wish I'd realized sooner that putting an amazing display in a shit laptop still leaves you with .... a shit laptop.
I’m guessing that “photo” is in fact a mock-up? Because it appears to show a screen that is able to occlude the background with both light and dark colors, which is not consistent with the description of the technology.
I hope they start with small array counts and build up from there.. you can imagine them having a "super bright super low power small display with 200x400 pixels" actually being useful in plenty of places.. then build up from there step by step.. So if AR is that application then, great. But don't try to jump from barely manufacturable to 4k2k VR display as your first step.. sort of like Lytro -- they just were like, "yea we just need to be able to make the densest highest quality and highest lens count micro lens array in the world to be successful!" My advice to the microLED people.. start small.. no pun intended, but yea.. don't try to hit a grand slam on day 1.
From a bit of googling just now, it seems that LEDs are effectively “two-way” devices: they emit light, but they can also sense light—just like the way that any loudspeaker is also fundamentally a microphone.
Which leads me to wonder: would a microLED array make a better camera input than current CCDs?
Interesting idea,although consider density. A Micro 4/3 camera sensor used on the popular Panasonic GH5 video camera is tiny but captures 4k video, displayed on screens far far larger.
Micro LEDs would need to be far, far smaller to be used as sensors.
If so, this could allow front facing cameras and webcams to be placed dead center of the screen, allowing 0 bezels without awkward camera placement like Dell XPS has.
> The second approach to microLED displays seems absurd on the face of it, yet it has the potential to work in smart-watch screens and larger displays. It involves dicing up wafers into individual microLEDs, making sure they’re all working perfectly, and transferring each one to its proper place on the display (not necessarily in that order). A 42-mm Apple Watch has roughly 120,000 pixels, each one of three colors, so that might mean some 360,000 microLEDs. “You need a technology that can transfer 30,000 LEDs per second for a consumer application,” says Virey.
Not sure if I understand this correctly, do they mean moving micro-LEDs during the manufacturing process, or when the device is being used? If it is the latter, it seems ridiculously cool!
Samsung has already demonstrated a MicroLED TV, LG is also on the wagon, yet the article fails to mention at all any of these big display companies and keeps going on about Apple and how it competes with Google and a few startups in the space.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] threadOr, alternatively, the display can be made from a whole wafer, which will cost about a thousand dollars for the raw materials and perhaps $5k for the finished display.
I know technology tends to advance a lot, but the advances required for microled to work seem really far fetched. Also, display technology does not advance as quickly as digital computation technology. Remember we have been talking about OLEDs for at least 20 years now and they are only now becoming mainstream.
This technology, if it ever works, will be for very small devices where brightness is very important but resolution is not that important. So smart glasses and smart watches. Even for those applications it is not at all certain that they will be able to bring the cost down sufficiently.
Now get that to 300-400 dpi in the palm of your hand. That's the issue with getting it "working" in a phone. Quite different.
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/clearboard/
See: http://itsbeau.com/work/avatar/ (scroll down)
ILI9341 modules are less than $5 each, and have 16/18-bit color with typical resolutions of 240x320. You can separate the actual panel from its backlights and casing without damaging it if you're careful, so I was thinking of trying to maybe put one in a box for a sort of DIY projector or something.
But I'm also pretty sure there's some reason why it won't work; maybe the glass is too polarized, maybe the colors are too dim, etc.
I just got myself an abandoned one - the Karolinska Institute, where I work, is moving, and they are throwing away a lot of crap. I took one of the overhead projectors, stripped out the old 240 Watts lamp + cooling unit (to be replaced with a less energy-draining yet brighter LED panel from the inside. Perhaps even one of those that can be programmed to change colors).
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXX2UkucO8w
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKL9_bdtHq0
You can certainly build a DIY projector that way. Building a high quality projector is hard but a crappy one is very simple. If you jam an LCD between a light source and a lens at the right distances you will get an image. Slide projectors, camera lenses, magnifying glass lenses, even those fresnel page magnifier lenses work.
Anyone has a ballpark figure for Si wafers? All I found quickly was a chart image mentioning around 3k USD ( http://semimd.com/blog/2014/05/16/st-licenses-28nm-fd-soi-to... )
Source: last charged my watch (3HR) more than a week ago; 47% remaining.
I knew I'd never actually use it but was hoping it'd be relatively hackable and I'd think of a use case for it. That never eventuated.
Secondly, you only get long battery life in a small package one tiny step at a time, and you want them, either to increase battery life or to make smaller watches. The latter is particularly hard. A typical smart watch is around 10 mm thick, nowadays, 2 or so of which are taken by the display and the back panel. So, if you want to make it 8 mm thick, you lose 25% of inner volume and, ballpark, the same on battery volume (taking into account that the battery is shielded, likely closer to 30%)
Finally, I’m not sure that transflective display is that low power if you want to frequently update the display. Looking at the data sheet of https://eu.mouser.com/new/Sharpsma/sharpmemorylcd/, page 14 lists power use of 15 μW on a static display, 50 μW on a display that updates at 1 Hz. Extrapolating, I get 2115 μW at 60 Hz, or about 2 mW. The capacity of a typical smartwatch battery is less than 1 Wh, so that display could display video for 500 hours or 20 days (rounded up a few times)
With respect to power consumption, the video codec would probably draw more than 100mW [1], and at that point, the 2mW display consumption would not matter.
[1] a 640x480@15fps hardware decoder draws 71mW. https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/fa11/cse291-a/pdf/02/JSSC_st...
Still larger, more so if you go to 30 Hz or higher, but there is no silver bullet if you want a smaller watch or longer battery life.
I’m wondering if this is a “flying car” thing—if actually handing consumers ultra-thin bendable (but not actually creasable) panels would be a dumb idea, because consumers would try to exceed their tolerances and break them too easily.
(This is also, I think, why we don’t see more optical cabling standards outside of the enterprise space. The average consumer can’t be trusted to install a glass-fibre cable run without breaking it; and when they break it, they’ll get angry, because glass-fibre cables still cost a lot of money. And plastic-fibre cabling, though more tolerant, is far less of an improvement over copper, especially in attenuation distance.)
I don't see the point of a display that folds. The display would be worse than any I currently own. It would be more prone to breakage due to the nature of what you're asking it to do.
I think it's one of those technologies that sounds neat, but in reality is not that useful (like 3D tvs)
3D TV's, on the other hand, I love and am very sad that they're now not being produced... Just when the size and resolution of TVs is getting good enough to make them worthwhile.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKG7XRsG9KQ
(plus it would sell really well)
Flexible displays are far too fragile to be practical except in applications where they're literally bent only once and then affixed to something for the rest of their life.
Also, aren't they used for curved TV screens and computer monitors?
There is a catch that programming these displays require one to learn differential geometry as a prerequisite.
https://remarkable.com
I had the iliad, a Dutch tablet in the very early days of e-paper. Slow, unworkable latency in drawing, buggy software, low support for digital book formats. I tried a few other e-paper devices since then, but they didn't improve on a lot.
The Microsoft Surface 2 seriously improved on this space. But it was still not feeling well - still too much lag. And then there is the huge problem that Windows is not suitable for tablets - it's a nightmare to work with compared to Android.
Surface 3 got it right enough, the feel is good enough to do some serious drawing on it. Microsoft OneNote is pretty much ideal for many usecases but has its cases where it becomes unbearingly slow. I have not yet tried the Surface 4 or the iPad Pro.
The ideal of an android device with a OneNote version which supports plugins and an app-store on a color latencyless e-paper display is still a decade away it seems.
There problem is, screens need a protective layer on top, and bendable glass tech hasn't caught up. You need to be able to embed a touch layer, have good optical clarity, be scratch resistant, and impart resistant.
I've, gently, played with production ready bendable LCDs. Then realized that they weren't practical for any of the sci-fi scenarios I had imagined.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/band
http://www.samsung.com/global/galaxy/gear-fit2/
Actual applications do exist. :)
Lots of cell phones have screens with a slight curve to them now days. Or in the case of Samsung's edge displays, a rather dramatic curve.
To the best of my knowledge, neither display in those fitness products was flexible, just bendable.
I know that as of a few years ago, Corning was hard at work on flexible "glass" for flexible displays.
This is what I don't get. It's entirely possible that I'm particularly unimaginative, but I can't even think of any devices with screens I'd want to bend. All of my devices bend exactly as much as I want them to: none (or at least negligibly).
How about a 75' TV you can carry around like a scroll.
It'd be a rather thick scroll. :)
The problem of break-ability again comes to mind.
The use case is niche. All the electronics for control still have to be there, so it isn't featherweight or anything, and it is not exactly pocket sized, and now the screen is really fragile.
Burn-in is still a huge issue. I've used mine for about a year and the red channel is full of distracting burn-in patterns from still elements on my screen from things like wallpapers, tiled window borders, taskbar/docks, HUDs from games, etc.
Does anyone know if MicroLEDs could suffer from burn-in as well? I.e. do they also degrade over time based on usage?
I've tested this by filling my screen with each color, and burn-in is by far the most visible with a red fill.
To your point, reports are that Apple is starting with Apple Watch.
I'm totally fine with Apple prioritize form over function when it comes to wearable, after all, I don't buy mechanical watches for their "functions".
Which leads me to wonder: would a microLED array make a better camera input than current CCDs?
Micro LEDs would need to be far, far smaller to be used as sensors.
(also see links at the end of that article)
Not sure if I understand this correctly, do they mean moving micro-LEDs during the manufacturing process, or when the device is being used? If it is the latter, it seems ridiculously cool!
Disappointed that this article has IEEE's brand.