MIT Develops Inexpensive Transparent Display Using Nanoparticles

rtoz writes "Researchers at MIT have come up with an innovative approach to creating transparent displays inexpensively, while providing wide viewing angles and scalability to large sizes. To create the transparent display, silver nanoparticles are embedded in plastic, tuned to scatter only certain wavelengths of light and to allow all other wavelengths through. In this example (video), it is tuned to scatter only blue color using 60nm silver particles. The researchers believe that it can be easily enhanced to a multicolor display by creating nanoparticles that can scatter other primary colors. The ability to display graphics and texts on an inexpensive transparent screen could enable many useful applications. For example, they could bring navigation data to windshields of cars and aircraft, and advertisements to the sides of skyscrapers. Cheap 'stick-on screens' could be developed using this technology. The messages broadcast on nanoparticle screens are accessible from virtually every angle. Transparent screens themselves are not new; for example, Google is working on Google glass. But they are expensive. This MIT invention will help to produce transparent displays easily and inexpensively."

Re:It's inexpensive, yet it uses Silver

[Khashishi]

Standard mirrors probably use much more silver than this.

A little misleading

[Professr3]

According to the abstract, this is a projection screen only. They fill a transparent sheet with tuned nanoparticle subpixels, and they project monochrome light onto the subpixels that are tuned to the color of light they want. So, it still requires an external monochrome image projector with at least three times the resolution of the "transparent display". It'd be simpler to just fill a transparent sheet with *regular* silver particles and use a *regular* color projector. The science is cool but - as usual - impractical for this particular use