MIT Develops Inexpensive Transparent Display Using Nanoparticles 87
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."
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Eh, I can see the most loathsome terrible people in the universe getting a little ad-revenue out of store windows.
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Huh. Loathsome and terrible? A store window seems like the perfect place to be selling things. People have been putting animated advertisements in them for decades. That being said, this seems a rather expensive way to do it. Glass is much cheaper to replace.
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Huh. Loathsome and terrible? A store window seems like the perfect place to be selling things. People have been putting animated advertisements in them for decades. That being said, this seems a rather expensive way to do it. Glass is much cheaper to replace.
Always expensive the first generation is.
Each succession more accommodating is.
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That occurred to me to, but I think it is a safe bet that a pane of glass will *always* be cheaper than glass plus nanoparticles plus circuitry and power. That being said, I'm sure there's a point where it'll eventually become cheap enough to make an entire storefront window out of it, and realise some benefit from the visuals over more traditional forms of advertisement.
Assuming storefronts still exist then, and assuming it becomes common to use, I'd move on to the main point. What's the big deal? Store
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That occurred to me to, but I think it is a safe bet that a pane of glass will *always* be cheaper than glass plus nanoparticles plus circuitry and power. That being said, I'm sure there's a point where it'll eventually become cheap enough to make an entire storefront window out of it, and realise some benefit from the visuals over more traditional forms of advertisement.
Assuming storefronts still exist then, and assuming it becomes common to use, I'd move on to the main point. What's the big deal? Store windows basically are nothing *but* advertising...
Well, actually, what they were saying was that the actual display was a sheet of plastic stuck onto the glass. Meaning that you could retro-fit an existing window.
This could be even more interesting if it can be done as in the paperwhite displays, where the image consumes no power while static. You could then easily have your own programmable "stained glass" windows, Not to mention a new approach for automatically-shading windows.
Speaking of paperwhite displays, at least one major retailer has been pepperin
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That is interesting, but doesn't change anything on the point of replacing a vandalised window or cheapness of glass :)
But, yeah, my main point was, I don't get why the parent, way back up there, was so worked up about a store window having advertising. That's what those large front store windows are *for* and even today are often filled with transparent plastic decals, paper posters, store merchandise, TV screens, even animatronics.
And certainly if this comes down in price it could be worth augmenting all
That's just great... (Score:1)
All high-rises will become huge billboards. Shades of our future Blade Runner aesthetic.
Re:That's just great... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Captain, I must have some platinum. A small block would be sufficient, five or six pounds.
Re:It's inexpensive, yet it uses Silver (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sick of people coming up with these inventions that use some form of exotic material. Silver, gold, palladium, rhodium ... for God's sake, use something that is not an investment grade metal.
Considering the prices people pay for electronics, the raw materials are a tiny fraction of the cost. The quantities of these metals is likely no more than you're already getting in your $300 Samsung 27 inch monitor.
I for one would pay extra for something much cooler than ordinary LED, especially if I could stack them and get some cool 3D effect out of it. :P
Re:It's inexpensive, yet it uses Silver (Score:4, Informative)
Standard mirrors probably use much more silver than this.
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Standard mirrors probably use much more silver than this.
Standard mirrors are generally "silvered" with aluminum.
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Stop being afraid of prices. If silver is $20/oz and one of these displays requires one thousandth of an ounce, then the cost of silver in one is two cents, so who cares?
Go figure out what the actual cost is and then you can figure out whether you need to engineer a suitable replacement 60nm (polar?) nano-organic for mass production.
We have plenty of silver on Earth - my god, you must've been locked in a closet in fear when everybody was running around with semi-disposable silver halite emulsions in their
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Bit of historical trivia; when the Spanish arrived in the Americas silver and gold were very close in value to each other. The conquest of Mexico and Peru flooded the market with so much silver that the price dropped to 1/10th that of gold. There are altars in churches in Lima and Cusco (and probably in Mexico) made of half a ton of solid silver.
Re:It's inexpensive, yet it uses Silver (Score:4, Funny)
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There's probably more silver in the solder inside your LCDTV than there is in this panel. Calm your tits.
Blue screen of death (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Blue screen of death (Score:5, Interesting)
That came to mind for me. The "display" they appear to be demonstrating uses a projector to illuminate desired areas of nanoparticles. The new technology here is that the particles respond to a specific bandwidth of light, letting others through. If one had a bright light of that specific bandwidth (say, a deliberately de-focused laser), he/she could illuminate the screen from another location, blinding the driver if the screen covered a large enough area of the windshield.
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Cars? Depending on the resolution (and they are using nanoparticles, while film used grains of silver) we're looking towards having holographic computer displays in the near (?) future.
The way a hologram (that uses film) works is, you take a laser and a dark room and unexposed film. IIRC (and it's been almost four decades since I took that class) you split the beam, and illuminate the film with one half of the beam (focused IIRC) and the subject with the other.
When you develop the film there's nothing recog
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If I had a bright light, I could blind the driver no matter what.
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Interesting but needs more work (Score:1)
If you watch the video (skipping the useless talking parts), you will see that the product demos are in front of a very dark backdrop. When the random hand picks up a MIT mug behind the active elements on the screen, the purple color becomes very washed out by the mild lighting off the mug.
I'm not sure whether this is a raw power problem or a limit of the method they are using, but it needs something more before it can even work in a dimly lit room. If they get it to work under standard fluorescent office
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Aaron arranged for Aaron's death. What did he come up with?
"Death By Conspiracy Theory"
It's all the rage these days. I'm thinking I need to come up with something memorable when I drive off a cliff in a stolen flying car.
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I'm thinking I need to come up with something memorable when I drive off a cliff in a stolen flying car.
Pretty much all cars that drive off cliffs are flying. Not for long and the landing sucks, but flying none-the-less.
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I'm thinking I need to come up with something memorable when I drive off a cliff in a stolen flying car.
Pretty much all cars that drive off cliffs are flying. Not for long and the landing sucks, but flying none-the-less.
This is why I need something out of the ordinary - zapped by aliens, crushed by a giant Terry Gilliamesque foot, that sorta thing.
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"The bullet flew through the air and hit me in the shoulder." I guess that doesn't meet the second definition, but it's not uncommon usage.
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Hey look! The people who arranged for the death of Aaron Swartz have come up with something new.
It's called The Ring. You should watch it!
I told you never to call me on this wall! (Score:2, Funny)
This is an unlisted wall!
Include Adverts on my windshield (Score:1)
and I will never buy your product again. Hell if I'm in an accident due to your advertisement and I survive, I'll sue you into oblivion and guess what, Your insurance company is not going to cover you.
One thing this tech may be used for is improving vehicle safety by providing a better HUD (heads up display) for things like a NiR (near infrared) and UV camera that allows me to see the fucktard driving w their headlamps off just after sunset because he thinks he don't need them.
How about seeing the damn idio
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There is no potential for this to be used as a better HUD. One of the fundamental principles of HUDs is that they use reflex optics. The image is not projected onto the glass but rather is reflected off of the glass and focused such that it appears to be at approximately the same distance from you as whatever physical object it is being displayed in front of. This is done so that you do not have to continually refocus your eyes to flip between the display and your forward view.
The only real value for suc
A little misleading (Score:5, Informative)
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Not only that, but notice that the demo video conveniently has them moving a set of cups behind the screen, none of which are blue. The glaring omission here is what happens if something blue does get moved behind the display - like say when you're out driving and a blue car goes past, or you look at the sky? Does that get badly distorted/dimmed? And if so, and I want an RGB version of this, what happens?
It would be sweet if you could project e.g. IR light at it and have that come out with a frequency shift
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How badly things get distorted probably depends on the specific frequencies of light they choose to represent the primary colors; how common those specific frequencies are in nature; and how tightly tuned the silver nanoparticles really are (how much of the light a little above and a little below the target frequency also gets reflected). If they can target the frequencies closely enough and choose shades that aren't quite as common, then the effect might not be very notable. If they can select all three c
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"It would be sweet if you could project e.g. IR light at it and have that come out with a frequency shift, but that doesn't seem to be what's happening."
You would need a fair bit of power to upshift. You need almost none to downshift. You can do it, though. There are 'green' lasers that are made from dual red lasers timed just so and thus the apparent wavelength is effectively a ~530-550nm 'green'
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Right. Mode parent up.
MIT's "nanotechnology" articles are getting really bad. Their press office overhypes every little effect someone demonstrates into "big new product really cheap real soon now".
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Yes and no. By tuning the particles to very specific frequencies they can make the material more transparent than something that scatters light in general.
Screens that scatter general light already exist - a fairly well-known example is a DILAD screen, which uses microscopic bubbles. MIT's screen looks to be significantly more transparent than a DILAD screen. DILADs work best with rear-projection, while MIT's seems geared for front-projection. DILADs are used for advertising displays, trade shows, and - mos
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How it actually works... (Score:4, Interesting)
...is as a projector screen that is only reflective at one very specific wavelength. It doesn't emit any light...there are no pixels...nothing about it changes what parts light up.
It's still quite novel...i'm not sure why they couldn't be more specific (or less misleading?) in describing it.
Keep in mind it's not totally transparent - see how the table looks yellow behind it? Add red and greed and you're going to reduce the incoming light further. They said it can be tuned...so could be changed to avoid any of the peaks in LED, CFL, and daylight. Will be interesting to see where this goes...but if they start painting cars and buildings with this it's going to do odd things to the incoming light.
Can it display black? (Score:2)
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You cannot do black on a reflective or emissive screen without material to absorb light. These reflective screen technologies work by adding light on top of whatever you are already seeing... kind of like an additive alpha overlay where "black" simply means don't add anything to whatever is already there.
70's British Scifi look is back in style! (Score:2)
It reminds me of something you'd see in a 70's or early 80's British scifi TV show, like Doctor Who or Blake's 7. Some sort of plexiglass being used as a monitor.
Pretty cool, but... (Score:2)
It's a cool demo, and a neat idea, but I keep hoping that the era of projection of images is winding down, with direct displays taking over. Even with advanced aspherical optics and laser projection there's limit to how close you can get to your viewing plane and still have a good display image.
Or transparent phones and tablets! (Score:1)
It will be like glossy vs matte on your laptop screen: you will know that it looks cool until you need to use it, but idiots buying them will make it hard to find anything else.
I guess I probably shouldn't worry about minor annoyances in consumer electronics in the future based on undeveloped technolog
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Voxels (Score:1)
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One-way for windshields (Score:1)
Cool (Score:2)
Cool, p0rn while I'm driving.
Hey... (Score:2)
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Weren't OLEDs supposed to deliver a lot of that same stuff a few years ago? What ever happened with that?
You can purchase the Samsung KN55S9C â' 55" OLED Smart TV today, and they are expecting 65" and 75" later this year.
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Transparent? (Score:1)
I'm working on a real transparent display, where both the background and the foreground are completely transparent.
Where do I get me some of that venture capital?
Poor-mans transparent display (Score:2)
If you have an old LCD screen with a burned-out CFL tube, you can pull of the back diffusers and have a fully-transparent LCD display.
Sure there's no self-illumination whatsoever so you need to have it against a bright background (eg a window during the day), the the effect is rather novel.
Most of the power needed to drive monitors is in the backlight, so chances are the power supply will be unnecessary. You'll probably be able to power it from the +12V/5V lines of your computer PSU.
If you're lucky and get
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Most LCD displays, even older CCFL-based ones, use less than 50W so there would be no problem powering most of those off the PC's PSUs if LCDs and PCs had such power options. With the USB3/3.1 power spec going up to 5A @ 20V and LED-lit LCDs usually using less than 30W unless either very large or very bright, we might actually see PC-powered 20+" displays in a year or two.
MIT (Score:2)
Is that really the official MIT logo? Terrible...
Where are... (Score:2)