Thread: Media Mesh and or OLED.

Originally Posted by Heather

OLED tint..interesting - he indicated that the OLED layer is pliable, I do not recall what he said about his patent, if the material is pliable yet, if not, it eventually would be.

Microsoft have had this in their "Microsoft Tech house of wonders" many years... 10 or so?
They didn't use OLED, just regular LCD. To change the transparency..

Today, with OLED. This is a piece of cake... Samsung have been a realy big pinoeer within the OLED industry, and have made displays that you can fold opp like a roll of paper, and hang it back up again, bendit , and curve it... All whil it's transmitting picture

Our local Oled Expert has agreed to stop by sometime in the near future to do a video, what questions would you like him to answer? He will provide a summary of the current technology and tell us where OLED technology is at...but the more specific you can be with your questions, the better.

Originally Posted by Crinos

Microsoft have had this in their "Microsoft Tech house of wonders" many years... 10 or so?
They didn't use OLED, just regular LCD. To change the transparency..

Today, with OLED. This is a piece of cake... Samsung have been a realy big pinoeer within the OLED industry, and have made displays that you can fold opp like a roll of paper, and hang it back up again, bendit , and curve it... All whil it's transmitting picture

great info! I have been searching with the wrong key words all along... now i have tons of stuff. samsung, lg/philips, and the us army/arizona state are developing variations of a flexible screens-- in lcd, o-led and oil/water based setups. Currently, they say the screens are predicted to be ready for military testing by 2010/2011, so for civilians, this should really start to become a reality in the next 5-10 years. Imagine, tailgating with a 60" screen that was rolled up in the back seat...

http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...lay+technology

Heather, most of my questions have to do with cost, and how cheap this technology will eventually get, and there isn't anyone that can predict that, until it happens, or is closer to a public/consumer release date.

I will definatly watch for the inteview.

Good questions - especially about the price. It would be interesting to know how much it would cost today to cover a car with OLED versus 5 years form now.

I hope that the price for prototypes can get low enough that we can sell some prototypes on the store.

Sorry it took so long for me to jump into the discussion. I run a Baltimore-based OLED R&D firm and Heather asked me to look at this thread and see if I could add some insight regarding automotive applications.

Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) and Liquid Crystal Displays (LCDs) are very different. To generate light and ultimately an illuminated image, LCDs require a backlight. Each LCD pixel is simply a light filter. The pixels are either transparent or opaque depending on whether or not a voltage is applied. The color simply comes from RGB color filters on each pixel. So, as 2K1Toaster noted, if you take that backlight away you end up with a transparent flat panel display, but it's not illuminated so their kind of hard to see. There was a company a while ago that made transparent displays using this principal; it was called the Transparent Imaging Matrix (TIM). They're out of buisines, but you can see a pic here and here.

Unlike LCDs, OLED display pixels can generate their own light when a voltage is applied. That's because each pixel is a light emitting diode, rather than a light filter. Also, OLED pixels can be made to be transparent. That means you can put an OLED on say a window, windshield, or anywhere really and it will just look like a window until you turn it on. These transparent OLEDs are called TOLEDs, and Samsung has demonstrated the first active matrix full color prototype TOLED. Here are some videos of this display.

Someone was asking about electroactive tint. Something in the "Smart-glass" family is probably your best bet right now. Electrochromic simply means that the materials become more or less transparent depending on the applied voltage. Liquid Crystal Pixels are electrochromic. OLEDs are electroluminescence, meaning they emit light rather than filter, so they are probably not suitable for a tint. However, liquid crystals are sandwiched between two sheets of glass and are not flexible. For a car you probably want a flexible film that you can adhere to a window, so you'd probably need an electrochromic polymer (or plastic) material. I'm not sure if anyone is working on or has developed this into a commercial product yet, but it sounds like a good idea.

So, regarding the American Airline Arena display, the arena LED-based jumbotrons operate exactly, and in fact OLED displays are really just miniaturized thin-film versions of these jumbotrons.

First to market will be standard OLEDs that are starting to replace typical LCD displays in small electronics. They are super efficient and the displays have a much greater contrast, so functionally it's a no brainer for product designers. I'll address the future of the OLED market in a separate post, hopefully tomorrow.