Boffins develop bendy, squishy, foldable display Scientists have displayed a screen that can be squashed, stretched and folded like rubber. UoT_rubber_OLED_01 The display's made from organic transistors, carbon nanotubes and fluorescent rubber Developed by Takao Someya, a Professor of Electronic Engineering, and his team from the University of Tokyo, the screen was …
This can only mean one thing.
HOUSE! on buzzword bingo.
Where do I claim my prize?
Seriously quite interesting but what about power requirements? And historically OLEDs have been failure prone doe to exposure to atmospheric contamination from things like Oxygen and water vapour. Any word on life expectancy?
Very nice. Can't help wondering how easy that's going to be to shift to mass-production, but still. Cute. Can't help thinking this could be one of those things I bore my kids with tales about having seen the arrival of. Like my Dad and Xerography (although that was anything but boring, of course*...)
Side note: I want to be a boffin. Is there a US university I can buy the qualification from?
*The story goes: he was shown a proof-of-concept style demonstration of the technology, involving a charged plate being selectively uncharged with a projected image, then "dipped" in toner and pressed against paper, which was then heated and shown triumphantly. He described it as looking like lithography, only about a million times less efficient, with no obvious chance of being made practical.
This technology eventually became the ubiquitous photocopier and laser printer, of course. D'oh.
I can see it now...the first profitable application will be an inflatable "love" doll with the size and color of each and every naughty bit separately controllable by the, ah, user.
Hmmm. It may even be possible to make it omnigender - and either serially or simultaneously at that.
(if you don't understand the Paris tag then ask your mother or father to explain it to you)
"he was shown a proof-of-concept style demonstration of the technology,"
Good grief that sounds like something Chester Carlson would have been demonstrating back in the later 1930s.
To be fair to your dad (who sounds like he declined this business opportunity) it takes a *lot* of imagination to go from that to a photocopier. And a great deal of trust in the team that's going to do the work. My reading on innovations suggests all serious innovations *never* run to anybodies original idea of a development or marketing schedule. While all of them *superficially* resemble existing things (printing is just a sort of mechanical writing) in reality they are the *start* of the art. Time will tell if this one is the tipping point into large scale acceptance.
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