Keep an eye on your data.

This month’s column starts with a trip to a flea market in Mesa, Arizona.  While walking the endless aisles of this social phenomenon I came across an intricate 3 dimensional glass etching. Subsequent research disclosed that this technology uses a laser to penetrate a piece of high quality colorless glass and heat a small area until it explodes inside the cube leaving a small bubble.  Depending on the subject matter, the result is tens of thousands of minute bubbles combining to create art.  Since, for me, technology is always just a thought away, it didn’t take long to make the leap and wonder what a laser crystal computer monitor would look like.

Not to many years ago, the computer world was defined by green screen monitors.  When Compaq came out with the amber monitor in the mid-80s, we could hardly get enough of them.  Color soon followed and life was great!

Skip a couple of decades and we are looking at things like OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes), Bistable displays, microdisplays, flexible substrate displays, FEDs (field-emitter displays) and incredible 3-D displays that don’t require those cardboard glasses. Lets take a closer look at some of these technologies.

OLEDs are layers of organic films between two conductors.  When power is applied, the cells have a phosphorous glow that creates a very bright light.. These films which can be thought of as a layer of cellophane on either side of a sheet of paper are very thin – .5 thousandths of a millimeter (about 1/10^th the thickness of normal typing paper).  These displays don’t require any backlighting,have a faster response to video, are less susceptible to temperature changes, require lower power and are more durable.  This technology will be the next generation of laptop display.

When OLEDs are applied to a flexible material such as plastic, metal or a special glass, you have a display that can be rolled and carried like a scroll or a window shade. 

Microdisplays are comprised of thousands of tiny electronic displays that are used in a magnified optical system.  Think of them as a 2560 x 2048 pixel display all scrunched into a 1” diagonal display.  This display can then be projected or viewed directly through magnifying material.  Current applications are experimenting with applying them to glasses for direct on-lens viewing.  Your monitor would then be those cool Ray Bans you now use.

The 3-D display initially used in computer aided design and became wildly popular for gaming ,is now seeing wide adoption in the medical field.  Imagine doing an arthroscopic surgery where the display wasn’t just a flat view but included depth.  As breathtaking as seeing an unborn child is now, what a wonder it will be when they have dimension.  Think of seeing an arthritic knee as a hologram. Current activity in this field is like science fiction.

Agriculture has a real need for these kinds of displays that are impervious to the elements.  Imagine looking at an applicator windshield and seeing the field overlaid with soil type, NPK analysis, micronutrient requirements, and the like.  With RFID reading at the granular level, you could even see the application history.  You pick which data is important to see on top of the field view.  Step out of the truck, and the display moves with you – onto your 3-D glasses, or a sheet of material you carry with you (much like that red bandana in your hip pocket.).  With some yield information data, you could even project the crop growth on the field.

That kind of stuff is on the drawing board now.  A little further out and technology will send the display right from the computer to the optic nerve.  After all, the optic nerve just responds to electrical stimuli sent by the cells of the retina.  When you would speak at a conference, you wouldn’t need a projector – you would just transmit to everyone’s eyes.   Your customer could transmit what he is seeing in his field as he sees it.  The biggest problem then would be remembering to turn it off – I shudder to think.