Alex Watson
While Apple has raised the bar in terms of the quality of screens it uses, it’s still using standard LCD displays: a backlit glass sandwich of liquid crystals. It’s the standard display technology for a huge variety of uses, from TVs to laptops, phones to information boards in public places. Traditional CRTs are rarely seen these days and LCD’s competitors are all specialists with significant downsides. The only display technology that has made any real inroad into consumer products (for anything other than status panels) is eInk, as seen in the Amazon Kindle and competing eReaders. It’s likely to remain in this small but significant niche as its refresh rates are too slow for fluid motion and video – all of which leaves the question, where do displays go after the LCD?
It may be that LCD remains the core technology for a considerable period – after all, it produces displays that are thin, low power and bright. It’s not a perfect technology, however, and one of the key areas where LCD can be improved is its use of glass to sandwich the liquid crystals. Glass is a relatively heavy material and it’s completely rigid, which restricts form factor design. The fact it’s rigid also means it’s fragile – as anyone who’s dropped an iPhone knows.
Numerous companies have looked into the possibility of making LCDs with flexible (say, plastic) surfaces over the past few years, but one that really caught my eye was a recent research concept from Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI).
The key difficulty with making a flexible LCD display is making the liquid crystals that comprise the display stick to a piece of flexible plastic in the regular grid pattern a screen needs. During manufacture, typically the liquid crystals are arranged on a piece of glass, the flexible plastic is stuck on top and it’s then peeled away. The separation part of the process is currently prone to errors and is a key reason why we can’t make flexible LCD displays on a large scale.
Taiwan ITRI’s method of solving this problem, called FlexUPD, recently won an award from The Wall Street Journal. ITRI’s technique involves using a special ‘non-stick de-bonding layer’, which allows smooth removal of the flexible plastic from the glass backing – think of a pan coated in Teflon and you’re on the right track (fancifully, ITRI’s press release claims the technology was apparently inspired by watching Taiwanese chefs cook very thin pancakes and peeling them away from non-stick pans). FlexUPD enables displays that can be only 0.01cm thick, and that are rollable and bendable.
ITRI claims industrial production of its 6in colour AMOLED e-paper using FlexUPD is ‘scheduled to begin within one year’.
Sony is a company not averse to far-fetched concepts (surely I don’t need to remind you of Aibo, the robot dog, or Rolly, the dancing MP3 thing?), and it’s also been looking into displays with paper-like tactility and robustness. The most recent made a low-key entrance in Japan back in September. Sony announced little in the way of details other than that, like ITRI, it was using a flexible plastic backing rather than glass. Sony’s demo wasn’t an LCD display, though, it was a monochrome eInk model.
Sony’s Korean rival LG – which makes the majority of panels for the iPad – claimed in an August statement to US investors that by the end of 2010 it hoped to commence manufacturing ‘mass-production of 19in flexible e-papers and 9.7in color [sic] e-papers.’
Tech firms have been talking about flexible e-paper for several years, and while the industry is probably getting closer to solving the manufacturing issues, a truly flexible display remains a huge design challenge. Since the introduction of the first personal displays with the TV, screens have always been rigid, and this rigidity informs our relationship with them. One of the most notable successes of the iPad, for me, is that it’s the first computer that the majority of people seem physically comfortable with: its lack of keyboard, fans, slots and drives means it’s easy to hold in a way which is closer to a more organic product such as paper. However, the iPad is still fundamentally a rigid screen and it’s very difficult to conceive just how much making its display flexible would change it.
Another possible route for LCDs is one both Microsoft and Apple itself have been investigating: turning the screen itself into a camera. Apple’s iOS devices use capacitive touchscreens: the screen itself carries a small electrical charge and, as your skin is electrically conductive, when you touch it, you disrupt the expected electrostatic field and the device can tell where your fingers are.
Microsoft’s Surface – a large table with a touchscreen as the top – uses a different system to detect input: essentially, a series of cameras and IR sensors watch a projected image and see what gestures you’re making. The advantages are that you don’t need to touch skin to screen to register a gesture. So not only can you use gloves when using Surface (a benefit if the screen is outdoors), the screen can also interact with non-organic objects – anything from styluses (think paintbrushes) to dice, building blocks and tokens.
This opens up a range of uses particularly if the touchscreen is in a shared space: if the table in your kitchen featured this kind of display, each person in the family could have a key token that enabled a customised set of information to appear; the screen could interact with children’s toys, and enable video games that comprise graphics and real, 3D objects.
At the moment, Surface (literally, it’s a table) is huge because it embeds a series of cameras in its body. This summer, Microsoft’s Principal Researcher, Bill Buxton III, explained in a newspaper interview that in future, he expected ‘Surface will become no thicker than a sheet of glass… It’s not going to have any cameras or projectors because the cameras will be embedded in the device itself. The best way to think about it is like a big LCD where there’s a fourth pixel in every triad. So there’s red, green and blue pixels giving you light, and a fourth pixel, which is a sensor that will capture stuff; go the other direction.’
Apple has a history with this sort of technology, too. Back in 2006, Engadget unearthed a patent that explained that Apple planned to embed sensors in between the pixels in an LCD screen, and had a method whereby the data could be recompiled into an image. In January 2009, another Apple patent saw Cupertino planning to put a camera behind the centre of the screen and to have the screen go transparent when inactive.
Clearly, the technology isn’t ready yet, as Apple is pushing ahead with adding small, front-facing cameras to the iPhone and iPod touch (and, in all likelihood, the next iPad). Still, you can see the attraction to Steve Jobs: not only is it cool, but a screen with an embedded camera means an ever neater, smaller bezel.
