Revolutionary Display Technologies Closer to Reality

All handhelds involve at least one major compromise: users want a large screen but also want a device that easily fits in their pockets. Researchers are working on ways to make these two contrary goals possible and recently demonstrated products that show great promise.

Wireless Head-Mounted Display

MicroOptical demonstrated last week a prototype of its SV-3 viewer, which mounts on eyeglasses or safety eyewear and provides a qVGA image that can be seen with one eye. The 6-bit color display is capable of showing both bitmaps and text. Unlike other head-mounted displays, it isn't tethered to a handheld or PC by wires. Instead, it connects wirelessly via Bluetooth.

The DV-1 viewer will be available to application providers and systems integrators in mid-June as a developer's kit. Mark Spitzer, CEO of MicroOptical, said, "Our developer's kit will allow the development community to evaluate the technology and create business and consumer applications that require mobility, situational awareness and privacy, such as public safety, inventory management and medical data viewing, all with the user un-tethered from the image source."

MicroOptical makes a number of other head-mounted displays which offer higher-quality images, but all of these require a wired connection.

Electronic Ink

E Ink Corporation and Royal Philips Electronics unveiling of their latest joint prototypes of electronic ink displays earlier this month. These deliver the readability of paper without backlighting and are thin and light. And they can maintain their image without power, drawing current only when they change, which means batteries can be smaller and last longer.

These engineering samples, developed for a lead customer, are the first high-resolution display products using commercial-grade components. The displays have a resolution of 160 pixels per inch (ppi), significantly higher than anything demonstrated previously. This was possible because of continued improvement in E Ink's electronic ink display material and Philips' custom designed thin-film-transistor (TFT) backplane and driver electronics.

Dan Button, E Ink's vice president and general manager, said, "E Ink and Philips will be the first to commercialize true paper-like displays using electronic ink technology with mass production of electronic ink modules for our lead customer in early 2004 and broad commercial availability later that year."

Related Links

• Three Technologies That Could Profoundly Change Handhelds
• Inside Display Technology