'Computer-On-Glass' Display

bfries writes "Sharp Corp, Japan's largest maker of liquid crystal displays (LCDs), unveiled a screen Tuesday with microprocessor circuitry applied directly onto the glass, enabling it to function like a computer. It uses Sharp's continuous grain silicon (CGS) technology and should be used on some products in 2005."

Cool...

[Gruneun]

Just remind me to be excited again in three years. It's interesting, but not really news until there's, at the least, something to look at.

How's it look.

[FreeLinux]

I'm curious about how these screens look. One of the issues with LCD is the screens appearance. They are often hard to view unless at a precise angle, if you wear glasses, especially polarized glasses, they are even harder to view. Touch screen films make them harder still to view and now they are embedding the actual circuitry in the display. What's the viewing like?

Digital Photos

[Jezza]

Well they're talking about ultra-high resolutions for things like photographs, and maps. Of course this is going to need huge storage and processing abiliy if they're going to reporduce photographic quality on anything larger than a really small display. I'm guessing that the display would probably be most useful if it could dynamically change resolution perhaps displaying several resolutions at once, to combine video (HDTV perhaps) a computer output at a "normal resolution" (90dpi or so) and a photo quality section (say 300dpi or better).

The abiliy to offload some of the processing on the display would be very helpful. I can see that being a very useful display. Still the idea of storage on the display sounds like Minority Report to me. Very cool.

Didn't look like you could use as a display

[CutterDeke]

In the picture with the article, you could see the traces on the glass. Do they not show up when this is incorporated into a display?

I don't see the significance of this.

NOT A TROLL!!!! It's a joke! It's a joke!

[somethingwicked]

See parent. That's okay, I have karma to burn when this gets modded down as well...

First off, MY username is somethingwicked. Was I trolling myself???

NO!!! I was making a simple joke about how I briefly misinterpretted the wording of the original comment.

Does no one remember the old SNL joke I referenced? So MAYBE it wasn't that good a joke, it sure wasn't a troll

Re:Transparency

[Oculus Habent]

There's plenty of reason.

If Palm could make a PDA with one piece of glass instead of glass and PCB, it could save money.

Every LCD I've seen on a shelf or in a picture has a casing on it. If that space had extra glass with a microprocessor embedded - your LCD screen could be higher quality for less money.

If you want to go to the extreme of the clear hand-held computer, you will probably still have an area to hold it by and maybe even some buttons for using it, which will provide space for circuits.

Plugging the analog hole

[Anonymous Coward]

This technology would be great for putting decryption directly into the display, wouldn't it?

Re:Brain fart...

[Gruneun]

Heat must escape somewhere.

My suggestion was meant to be more along the lines of the water-cooling (with a radiator) that is popular among the overclocking crowd, not just a static pool of water. A display like this could be mounted on a wall, with the pump and radiator in a separate location, connected by a hose.

Re:Didn't look like you could use as a display

[Target Practice]

In the Reuters article linked below, the picture caption says a glass integrated with 8-bit central processing unit (CPU). I'm a bit confused, therefore, of their usage of the word "screen" later on. Do they mean to call the piece of glass a screen, so to say that the piece of glass is acting like a computer, or that it really is a screen and actually displays something?

Dangerous DRM possibilities

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I don't like this. Think about the possibilities for DRM: this is basically Jack Valenti's wet dream. If the whole computer is directly on the glass, there's no place to jack in. No place to tap the signal. No place to do anything. DRM hardware implemented mere nanometers from the pixels. Let's hope this technology does not come to fruition.

Re:Cool...

[BlueUnderwear]

So I guess, by looking at the rate the dupes [slashdot.org] are posted, we should see that computer in two weeks...