My Top Ten Display Movies

1) Minority Report: “A Day Made of Glass” comes to fruition. Similar amounts of digital signage can be found in “Blade Runner,” “1984”, “Ultraviolet”. Actually ubiquitous display technology is a common theme in many science fiction movies. One question the movie raises... A store window is kind of a display itself. At what point does that real estate become too valuable to leave it as a window and stores in high traffic areas routinely cover the front of their business in digital signage. The image here is not from the movie but the present day Akihabara. In pricier areas of Tokyo, the signage is just as dense but has been some form of electronic display for some time.

2) Poltergeist: Your mother always warned you about watching TV in the dark. This movie shows how hazardous it can really be. Similar themes are in “The Ring,” “Videodrome.” Something evil coming out of the TV is again a common theme. Consumers will not necessarily want the screens they are passing buy to recognize them or try and interact with them without first being invited. As digital signage learns to recognize passers-by and launch custom "push" advertising, an older person would not necessarily want every sign they pass to flash an ad for adult diapers.

3) 2001 A Space Odyssey: Not a display-centric movie like the others but featured lots of computer graphics that had to be created by hand as the technology did not exist when the movie was made. It also conveys some of the dangers of home automation. In the movie, HAL has a holographic processor. His system design would more resemble a massively parallel GPU than a CPU. As the embedded processing power in a TV set increases, it would be expected that that brain power would be put to other uses.

4) Strange Days: The display has no screen but plays directly in your head. However, the display is not interactive, you just sit there and watch/experience. The 1983 movie “Brainstorm” is centered on a similar device. "The Matrix" was also centered on such a device but was highly interactive; it incorporates social networking as well. There is always a market for a more lifelike display, hence the current interest in 3D. Presumably holographic displays will come between now and such an invention. There is some current development work being done on "smellivision," expanding the sensory input of a TV. Being the most primitive of the human senses, smell/taste bypasses most of the higher, logical, functions of the brain and can elicit a purely emotional reaction. Some restaurants utilize this by purposely venting their kitchens out of the front of the store rather than the back. With a selective venting system or a device that could adsorb smells and selectively release them on-que and digital signage, it could be possible to both display and smell individual menu items electronically.

5) Stay Tuned: As things can come out of your TV such as in “Poltergeist”, you can also fall in.... Actually they fall into the satellite dish but wind up in the TV. "Tron" is also in this category. Virtual reality headsets can give the impression that you are inside a digital creation or at some remote location. (Inherently, this is what a flight simulator does.) However, repeated launches of near-to-eye product have met with a ho-hum from the consumer. My own belief is that a holographic solution is needed to get around eye strain issues.

6)Red Planet Again, not a display centric movie but it does feature a flexible high information content display. Although very different, Dick Tracy has a similar device. OK, Dick Tracy is more famous as a newspaper cartoon rather than a movie. However, it is probably many folks introduction to the idea of a cell phone. With all of the knobs, it definitely did not have a touch panel, but being located on his wrist and having a curved screen, it probably uses an OLED rather than an LCD; very hip. This August 20 headline from the NY Times shows just how hip, "The Next Wave for the Wristwatch."

7)V for Vendetta registers on three counts. With all of the public information displays in London wired to a central system, it shows the need for network security to avoid having the system hijacked. The characters in the movie also make extensive use of videoconferencing and one of the key scenes takes place in a bathroom that is amply fitted with TV screens.... I believe that bathroom TVs will be one of the consumer spin-offs of the experience gained weatherizing LCDs for outdoor digital signage and outdoor TV. TVs in the bathroom have been standard in Westin hotels for some time.

8)Snow White I mentioned earlier that a shop window is a kind of display; so are the mirrors, especially in a clothing store. I think that Digital Mirrors are an inevitability. They can be signage as well when they are not working as mirrors. For the more color conscious, they can also show the appearance of clothing under different lighting conditions and can show the consumer against different backgrounds. In the home, the bathroom medicine cabinet offers a standard footprint that is begging for a product.

9)Amazon Women on the Moon: This movie is very similar to "The Boob Tube" but strangely not at all like "Amazon Women in in the Avocado Jungle". In the era before High Definition Content Protection (HDCP) the order to "Defend Borders" was ultimately a failure. However, the brick and mortar retailers have been able to mount a defense against "showrooming".

10) Couldn't think of ten, other than using some of the duplicates mentioned earlier. Check back and I will add more if I think of them. Please feel free to make suggestions in the Comments section.

Conclusion
I expect electronic displays to become ubiquitous in urban environments. I also expect these display to become increasingly smart, interactive, and more engrossing as well. However, human privacy must be respected. I expect OLED technology to have the greatest impact in the mobile market. Also, I mentioned holography quite a bit.

Norm

Will CCFL Baklights be around Next Year

Cold Cathode Florescent Lamps (CCFLs) provide the light that most LCDs use to produce an image. Sometimes technology transitions are subtle and take place over many years. More often than not they are dramatic, sudden, and absolute.... especially in display technology. Sam Matsuno of DisplaySearch, first came to prominence when he described the tipping point when LCDs would not only start replacing CRTs but that the transition would proceed rapidly. In notebook technology, the transition from the market being 80% monochrome to being 95% color only took about 9 months. (The transition from 4:3 to 16:10 followed a similar path.) Color LCDs reached a tipping point where there ceased to be any cost advantage to monochrome. Now we may have just such a tipping point in LCD backlights. "CCFL and LED price gap closes as CCFL costs explode"

For the CCFL suppliers to this market, "I just want to celebrate another day of livin, " from the band Rare Earth.

Norm

OLEDs and Swords

At my undergraduate college, one of the first things you are given to do in materials science lab is to make a small version of a samurai sword. Though the student body is certainly smart enough and they understand the principles, no one ever makes one that works, at least not to my knowledge. Success depends on getting the edge of the sword to follow the water quenching curve on the diagram while the time-temperature-transformation profile of the back of the sword more resembles the air cooling curve. Of course, the entire sword has to be water quenched at once. There is a story about a samurai sword maker that cut off the hand o his apprentice when the apprentice stuck his hand in the quench water to see what temperature it was; the water temperature was a secret that the master was not ready to reveal. The diagram above is referred to as a Time-Temperature-Tansformation (TTT) curve.

The entire process is very dynamic and analysis of the end product does not necessarily tell you what went on. The problem with a student sitting down and figuring this all out is that there are multiple variables and the entire process is very non-linear; the difference between being very close and being a million mils away is not always apparent. Sometimes it does not matter how smart you are, you have to have the right recipe. That is why a number of companies have sprung up in silicon valley that offer a process for testing multiple micro-samples at once, to speed up the process of finding the right recipe. This differs substantially from a normal product development where all of the sub-components can be tested separately. A valley VC that specializes in materials based companies once told me that he never actually invests in a company that has yet to complete their materials development. This is in part, why there are so few technical glass companies in the world. A lot depends on their experience and catalog of recipes (glass chemistry, furnace chemistry, heat treating, etc.) that they have built up over time. Sometimes tramp chemical elements in the parts per billion range can have a dramatic effect on the product outcome. As semi-conductor makers are aware, softly whispering the word alkali in the fab can put enough sodium in the product to kill production. It was a parts per billion chemistry issue (with a phosphor poison) that originally put Westinghouse, the inventor of the active matrix LCD, out of the TV business.

OLED process development has exactly the same issues.

Glass can be Hard for Digital Signage

Tutorial: Samurai Swords

Many crystalline structures actually get stronger under compression rather than weaker. A samurai sword is actually made from a straight piece of metal. It is the heat treating that causes the distinctive curvature and it is the heat treating that is responsible for the incredible sharpness. Iron forms different crystal structures at different temperatures and, like water, forming a new crystal structure at a lower temperature sometimes mean a volumetric expansion rather than contraction as in water to ice. The samurai sword heat treating process involves freezing in one crystal structure on the cutting edge of the blade while the body of the sword first contracts (forming the curvature) then goes through a final transition where it wants to expand. This leaves the edge under permanent compression and enables the edge to be polished to incredible levels of sharpness. Even though the process is centuries old, the metallurgy was not understood until the 1970s as nothing is at equilibrium. The image above is from the movie “Kill Bill” which provides ample demonstration of just how sharp samurai swords can be.

This principle of having the surface under compression from the internal structure is also used in glass. Correlle dinner ware is made from two separate glasses, a high expansion inner glass and a lower expansion outer glass. After the plates are formed from molten glass, the inner glass wants to contract more than the outer glass leaving the outer glass under compression. In chemically strengthened glass the outer layer compression is accomplished by substituting some of the atoms in the surface layer with atoms of a larger ionic diameter. Stuffing in these larger atoms leaves into the glass lattice leaves the surface under compression. In tempered glass, the compressive layer is due to freezing in an expanded, high temperature structure on the outside, while the interior cools more slowly and wants to contract.

Just on its own, glass can be pretty hard. Making it thicker makes it more rigid and less likely to break. The extra thickness can be either a monolithic structure or a laminate. It can also be over coated with materials that are even harder. Finally, for many applications, you can use a transparent plastic. Each approach has pluses and minuses.

Until now, glass has been the only material used in mainstream high information content displays. The displays themselves are going into different environments and designers of both digital signage and mobile devices (solar as well) are having to comprehend issues that they have never had to deal with before. This posting delves into some of these issues.

Coverglass Choices
Chemically strengthened glass can be made ultra-thin and is most commonly used on mobile devices where thinness is at a premium. However, the forming processes for very thin glass are limited and the ion exchange process to do the chemical strengthening is slow and therefore expensive. Also, the chemical strengthening must be done after cutting the pieces to size, further adding to the expense. (An earlier version of this post inadvertently stated the opposite. However the point is that the processing must be dome with individual parts rather than a motherglass, adding to the expense.) A Correlle-like structure could be tried but if you have ever owned Correlle, you may be aware that although the bi-glass structure works well, it does not work particularly well on the edges or any corners. Also, when the glass does break, due to the stored energy of the purpose built-in stress, it tends to shatter. (A well known book on WWII, concerns the Japanese defeat at Midway, “Shattered Sword”. The title of the book refers to the tendency of a well made samurai swords to shatter rather than just chip or bend.) Particularly for digital signage applications having a cover glass shatter rather than just break could be a consumer issue.

Tempered glass can not be used for LCDs due to the pattern of birefringence the tempering leaves in the glass. Birefringence is a polarization dependent optical effect that would interact with the polarized light coming from an LCD. An LCD viewed through thermally tempered glass would appear to have a mottled image. Coating the glass with an even harder substance is an option. But here again, the product would have optical issues. As far as I know, every material that you could coat the glass with has a higher index of refraction than glass. This would result in increased surface reflections.

Why not use Plastic?
Years ago, I read an article title “The Dream of an All-Plastic Car”. The article was published in ine of the chemical industry magazines and covered opportunities such as plastic bodies and plastic windows. However, it turns out that the dream of an all plastic car was the chemical companies’ dream, not the auto makers or consumers. There were a few models made with plastic bodies and one made with one plastic window (the side window on the back of a CRX. However, plastic does not age very well in the sun and has very very limited abrasion resistance. The auto industry did largely move to plastic headlamp covers. However, these often turn cloudy after a few years and the the cloudy appearance would not be acceptable for a window or auto-body.

Plastic does not have nearly the hardness of glass and can’t handle even moderate levels of abrasion without a grossly diminished finish. It also degrades under UV.

Plate Glass for Digital Signage
Currently, in the digital signage industry, most use plate glass to protect their signage where it is required (anywhere the public can actually touch the screen). UL provides a minimal level of guidance as to the thickness with its ball drop test. Meeting UL 6950 requires about 2mm of chemically strengthened glass or about 2.5mm of plate glass. Other architectural or automotive standards (ASTM or SAE) or practices may be applied leading to thicker glass and site architects my specify vandal-proof or even bullet-proof levels of protection. Thicknesses in actual use in the industry range up to 13mm, frequently either bonded to the LCD or two separate pieces of glass laminated together. The lamination adds strength and also protects the public from broken pieces should he cover glass do break.

Conclusion
The UL standard is a strength standard rather than a dimensional one that buyers of digital signage can test for, non-destructively. It provides minimal protection. Other standards may come from the architectural community, the materials suppliers, or groups like the SAE that are used to dealing with glass safety. However, it would be beneficial if the digital signage industry were to agree internally on standards for both product and consumer protection.

Norm