Seeing is believing alright and displays are what make seem everything digital come alive. Unfortunately they also consume the most power and increase the size of your carbon footprint while only getting bigger area wise. Or so you think. Enter the new wave of displays which promise a more enriching experience while trying to reduce how much electricity they drink as well.
Energy saving displays
LCD’s have come a long way from half a decade back, but problem is they still are energy sucking monsters. LCD’s have a backlight which illuminates the screen and almost 80% of it is lost in color filters and the like in the quest for generating bright and glowing colors.
1) OLED’s or Organic LED’s
OLED’s have many advantages over the conventional LCD, whose power consumption is a fourth or even lesser than that of LCD’s. Apart from that, the colors are much more vibrant and the viewing angle is wider as well. It also allows for thinner and lighter displays. And you can also go wild with your imagination with the advent of transparent and flexible OLED as shown in the above picture.
2) EInk
The Amazon Kindle, which is an eBook reader with a cool technology under its hood, called EInk. The cool thing about it is that once when the page is rendered, it doesn’t need energy to display the pixels. It’ll need energy only when you turn the page and the pixels re-arrange themselves. No back lighting, just like when you are reading a real book. The technology is still in the black and white stage, but expect it to go color in the forthcoming years.
3) MEMS
Qualcomm and Pixtronix too are working on displays which will try to reduce your electricity bills. They operate on MEMS which is again a very interesting innovation. They use tiny mirrors for every pixel allowing red, blue or green (these are the basic colors which when mixed, give you every other color in the world) light to pass through. They guarantee reduced power consumption by upto 80%. Which means your cell phone or music player could function for that much longer.
3D Displays and more
As of now, 3D to us is nothing more than 2D images smartly decked up into making us believe that they are 3D. The actual 3D is rather cumbersome and is what you get in the IMAX screens. What if I told you, this could happen right in your living room? Better still it’d be so freaking awesome to have images of (insert whoever sets your hormones raging here) walking right at you in all their 3 dimensional glory. And we’re not even talking about how immersive gaming could possibly get.
4) Sony 3D Display
Sony debuted such a display at CES 2009 and everyone who experienced what it could truly do, was ready to whip their credit cards out for it, recession be damned. The only problem being that you need stupid dark glasses for it, which are totally uncool.
5) NVidia GeForce 3D Vision
NVidia has cool looking glasses (on a strictly relative scale) which deliver the same effect for all NVidia supported games and graphics cards. If you already have a GeForce series card and a 120Hz display, you are good to go. Available for $199, only!
6) Philips 3D Display
Philips, being the totally innovative Dutch dudes, already have prototypes for 3D TV’s without glasses. I saw it in a mall recently and I think there’s still a lot of work to be done on it. But nevertheless, it is interesting.
7) iPoint 3D
Germans are always one step ahead of their other European counterparts and the iPoint 3D is proof of exactly that. This awesome tech from FhG allows you to communicate with the display panel using gestures. So, you could actually start changing channels with a click of your fingers or just plain waving to it and saying, “Oh Lord, forgive these douche bags. They dont know what they are doing” when you are watching Saturday Night Live.
The device was demo’d at CeBIT. But because its in Germany, my office didn’t send me there citing reasons such as “The Oktoberfest is 6 months away man. Screw stupid pointy 3D displays”.
8) Microsoft Surface
It came on the Apple iPhone first and then everyone took a fancy to it. Microsoft being one of the first, but they didn’t blatantly copy it, they went a step ahead. They created a display as large as a tea table and the ability for 5 people to work on it at once. Of course, I cannot imagine anything but a mess creation in process if 5 people, simultaneously, have a go at it.
Its biggest advantage is that it recognizes a variety of objects as inputs. For example in a bar, all the tables are Surface, your drink is about to reach its end. Thanks to reflection and refraction, Microsoft Surface detects it and informs the counter and you could decide the further course of action. Check out the above video.
9) Mercedes Benz Split View
Germans are always upto some good, thinking of something or the other that will take them closer to world domination. But this one is different in the way that it promotes world peace. What this does is simply show two people viewing from opposite angles different content. Which means you could catch a movie in the car and your driver will see a map instead and not be distracted.
Come to think of it, if this tech found its way into normal TV’s, the fight over the remote control would finally end, thereby promoting world peace. Will be available on all S Class models from this summer. That’ll totally shut BMW up about their new 7 series and their “Why should we say anything at all” campaign.
(There’s a Merc showroom right outside my office. Expect a review when the new S Class is out!)
10) Vuzix AV310
You love wide screen alright, but you don’t exactly want everyone to, ahem, see what you are seeing. Enter the Vuzix AV310, which is a wearable personal display. While they are nothing new, this one is a wide screen version and is equivalent to viewing a 52inch screen from 9 feet. You can connect it with a variety of devices including your iPod. Other creative uses would include doing the blind act and asking a cute chick to help you cross the road.
