Neal's Notes

According to the Society for Information Display (SID), “the display industry is valued at over $100 billion annually.”

No small change. Not surprisingly, the annual SID Display Week conference attracts scores of companies, editors and analysts worldwide.

This year’s 50th anniversary conference recently wrapped up in Boston. There’s always a central theme – this year there were actually four– Touch & Interactivity, Flexible Electronics and Printed Displays, and Green Technologies. Anything remotely related to display could be found – manufacturing, measurement, systems, emissive and flexible displays, touch and interactivity, even OLEDs.

Out on the exhibit floor, there were a lot of innovative products/services on view, some of them that could be game-changers:

• Bordeaux, France-based Stantum and their Kyoto-based partner, Nissha Printing Co., Ltd., introduced FineTouch Z, a disruptive, pressure-based transparent touch-panel technology.

• Corning Glass Works debuted Willow glass, which the company formulated for electronic components such as touch sensors, as well as serving as a seal for OLED displays and other moisture and oxygen sensitive technologies.

• Samsung exhibited a 55-inch OLED TV. As reported by Information Display’s Jenny Donelan, Samsung showed three of the panels in three different implementations – dual-view, 2D view and 3D view. The dual-view implementation allows two viewers to watch and hear completely different content on the same screen.

• LG rolled out a 55” AMOLED TV which featured a new 4.5-inch AS-3D display that uses eye tracking to deliver what it calls Viewing Angle Free 3D.

• E Ink showed off a wide array of potential apps for its e-book reader (EBR) space. One off these included front-lights for night reading.

SID also unveiled the I-Zone (‘I’ for Innovation), a new exhibition feature for companies and organizations to showcase their demo units and prototypes. The buzz at the conference was that the I-Zone was well-received and will probably become a regular feature.

Some examples of I-Zone participants that offered some interesting technologies:

• Luxint debuted a solid-state light-source technology that it claims meets brightness/cost requirements of all types of projectors.

• Mirametrix rolled out what they call ‘consumer eye-gaze technology.’ This enables users to interact with virtual/real-world objects in 3D physical space or display environments using their eyes, “without the need for head-mounted equipment or expensive add-on hardware.”

In addition, a few universities and independent labs had some cool stuff to display.

• National Chiao Tung University and AU Optronics Corporation demonstrated what they claimed to be the world’s largest field-sequential-color (FSC) LCD without color filters.

• The Chinese Academy of Sciences exhibited a wedged waveguide and prism array with an edge-lit collimated (which adjusts the line of a sight in an optical device) backlight.

Next year’s venue is in Vancouver, BC. I’m sure we’ll see even more innovations as the display industry continues to evolve and develop market niches for both the B2B and B2C communities.