Future displays: smart, bendy, 3-D and more

TVs and electronic books could get thinner and bend.

By BRIER DUDLEY, Seattle Times / As seen in startribune.com

Talk about gazing into the future.

Imagine ultra high-definition TVs not much thicker than a millimeter.

How about electronic books made with plastic screens that flex like a magazine?

Or perhaps a display that lets you touch a virtual version of yourself on the other side of the glass?

The technology to build these crazy new gadgets was shown recently in Seattle during Display Week, the Society for Information Display conference. At the combination science fair and industry bazaar, inventors and component manufacturers showed their latest creations to consumer-electronics companies, looking for technology and materials to build the next iPad or wafer-thin 3-D TV.

It's a heady time for displays, which are moving way beyond glass panels that simply show information.

"A display is no longer an output device -- it's now also an input device," said Stevie Bathiche, research director of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division's applied-sciences group.

Such devices include Microsoft's Surface computer, which turns the display into a tabletop that uses optics, vision systems and software to "see" people using the system and understand their gestures. Prototypes also include Microsoft's Magic Window.

"It will feel like you have put a window on the wall or office and it's a window into someone else's home or office," Bathiche said. "It will be as if the person's in the next room."

Other innovations that surfaced at the show:

DuPont's OLED (organic light-emitting diode) panels. Made with a new technology, they could lead to affordable TVs made from the ultrathin, ultrabright and energy-efficient material. DuPont figured out a high-speed process similar to inkjet printing that sprays layers of the material onto a substrate. It results in a core TV panel that's about a millimeter thick. The company expects the technology to appear in mass-market TVs in 2012.

E Ink's flexible color LCD screens. The company that provides display technology to Amazon's Kindle and other devices is going after the huge and growing market for digital books and other products with flicker-free, electronic paper screens. Because E Ink uses little power, it's also starting to appear on devices that haven't traditionally had displays, such as thumb-drive computer-memory sticks.