Nanoresonators Create Ultra-High-Res Displays

TuurlijkNiet writes with this excerpt from Linux for Devices: "Eat your heart out, 'Retina display.' A new technology unveiled yesterday will allow creating pixels eight times smaller than the ones on Apple's iPhone 4, eliminate the need for polarizer layers, and allow screens to make much more efficient use of available light, say University of Michigan researchers. ... The pixels in the nanoresonator displays are about ten times smaller than those on a typical computer screen, and about eight times smaller than the pixels on the iPhone 4, which are about 78 microns, according to Guo. Such pixel densities could make the technology useful in projection displays, as well as wearable, bendable or extremely compact displays, according to the researchers."

cool

[Jarik C-Bol]

Now that they can make pixels so small that they can only be singled out from distances closer than my eyes can focus, they can finally put some effort into making.. i got nothing, i don't see the point of this.

IPhone Nano ...

[Zorlon]

Looking forward to teeny tiny iPhones

Can I get my watch in 1080p now?

[erroneus]

I am guessing this is "small enough" yes? Also, I want a netbook with a resolution higher than 1366x768 as well.

i never know what that means...

[WiglyWorm]

How does one read the phrase "8 times smaller "? Initially I want to take it as 1/8th the size, but "8 times" would indicate multiplication is involed...

Re:cool

[Monkeedude1212]

It'd need some way to determine how your eyes are focused though - whether you are intending to look at your hud or something distant. Hold up an object up to your eye about where your glasses would rest. Close the other eye that won't see the object. Look at the object, then look at the wall behind it. Edges should get fuzzy and details will get blurred. When you get into thin lines like a GUI Frame or Text Font, this kind of focus is crucial.

The annoying thing is, once you've been taught to read, any time the center of your gaze lands on upon letters your muscle memory forces you to read it, ultimately taking focus off of what you might have actually been looking at. Its possible to force yourself to ignore it, but you have to generally be trying not to read in order to not to read, which seems weird, because it should be easier to NOT do something than do something, right? Imagine words being printed on your glasses, and how quickly you'll be shifting back and forth between 1 inch from your eye and that person 5 feet away, how much eye strain that will cause and how this system will have to either adjust to be readable at both focal points, or at a very minimum NOT get in your way when you are looking at something else.

This fantasy of an good GUI overlay right over the eyes is really a difficult one to tackle. I'm not saying it can't be done, but even once we get the display down, there are still hurdles.

Re:cool

[DurendalMac]

I'm no expert on this, but what if they could be used to make LCDs that don't look like ass at non-native resolutions? If one pixel at 1920x1080 is actually a bunch of these tiny pixels acting as one (at least as far as the OS is concerned), then it would be far easier to "enlarge" that collection of pixels to act as a single pixel at 1280x720 by simply enlarging it by the proper number of subpixels. Seems feasible to me, but maybe someone with more experience in that area can chime in.

Autostereoscopic Displays

[cowtamer]

Where the resolution gets divided by the number of views displayed simultaneously. If you could make display with 1000 dpi resolution, you could turn it into an autostereoscopic display with horizontal parallax displaying 10 images at 100 dpi. I imagine a 10000 dpi screen would let you create something indistinguishable from a hologram with no glasses required to view it...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereoscopy [wikipedia.org]

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1320857 [acm.org]

Re:cool

[Dashiva Dan]

And aside for the obvious HUD-like qualities, remember you could have an external display on contact lenses. Programmable eye colour, animated eye colour. before long we'll have contacts that make a person's eyes look like marbles of doom [wikipedia.org], or something even more imaginative. That'd probably work better with e-ink unless you wanted your eyes to also glow in the dark.