Sony’s new, super-thin OLED display wraps around a pencil | Hacker News Reader

Sony’s new, super-thin OLED display wraps around a pencil

crunchgear.com

110 pointsGhost_Noname47 comments

So... when can I get my Daily Prophet? I'm expecting pictures of politicians making faces and such ;p This is truly impressive. I wonder if the lines are bad pixels or just meant to be there for testing.

When my university put RFID tags on all of our ID cards, I fantasized about setting up enough scanners to create a marauder's map.

All you would really need is a simple web server and a shit ton of RFID readers set up all over the place. Completely impractical, but plausible. Now that we've got e-paper, we've got the final piece.

You may only need 3 readers. Some off the shelf detectors can read RFIDs from 200 meters away (though they are physically quite large)

Can you point me to any?

I've searched before and never found something that would work for me.

Thanks!

http://www.iautomate.com/products/Wavetrend-L%252dRX201-Long...

Not quite the 200 meters that 'someone_here' posted, but the quoted max range of 450 feet is more than usual (I also don't have any idea how well it works).

Thanks for the link!

That seems like it could work! It also has different antenna options for different uses which would also work for what I had in mind! ( I have 2 projects in mind, 1 is for short range 2-10ft, the other is long range 50ft or so )

EDIT: Yikes! Just saw the prices for the tags, at $25-50/tag its too expensive :( I dont mind if the reader is expensive but the tags must be cheap less than $1 would be ideal

For that range it's probably using active tags, which is why they cost so much. On the other hand passive readers often cost a few thousand dollars and have tiny ranges so I think that active systems end up being cheaper in many deployments.

I'm working on an active tag system for my phd actually, and our readers only cost as much as our tags and have the same range but they still cost somewhere in the $30-$50 range depending upon how many we make at a time. In a few years we'll probably have the cost down to a dollar or so in mass production but your projects will need to wait a while.

Can you somehow triangulate an exact position by using the 3 readers? It's not enough to know a student is merely in range.

It would critically depend on the frequencies used by RFID (and multipath) but perhaps it could be done by measuring the time of transit?

I read once about a company doing that with cell phones, by reading the unique user id within GSM packets.

FWIW, To me the lines look like manufacturing defects, but you could be right.

Idea looks great though! I hope these become a reality at some point.

I'm more wondering when I'll be able to buy a 42" Sony OLED HDTV...

I know a guy who bought oled.com and a few other oled-related domains a few years back on a gamble that they would one day take off. I imagine he's pretty happy with that purchase right about now...

For a moment I thought OLED was trademarked and that the domains would be effectively forced over to the trademark owner. I did a quick US trademark search and couldn't find the OLED mark registered. His gamble will probably pay off.

Now that is amazing. What a neat development, this will enable a whole slew of new applications.

Unfortunately, they've been the "next big thing" for a number of years now. Apparently there are yield and longevity issues to be solved before mass production of large OLED displays. But yes, extremely cool.

The other option is to find a market for what they can build. For example, bring more effective advertising to consumers in places they don't normally get it. Something eye catchy?

Top of the table in a bar. Dance floor. Wearable.

The one thing that really gets me is that no matter how useful an invention is sooner or later someone will come along and plaster it full of ads.

My suggestion was to put ad dollars to good use. That's part of the formula for freemium. It's how X-Prizes are funded. Google is taking us to the moon. We're spending billions on ads every year. The paper kind that show up in my mailbox, that I immediately throw away, are worthless.

While I hate generic ads, I think that targeted ads are actually a boon to me, which is why I'm looking forward to a more smart-grid approach to advertising in the future.

Think about it. There are millions of people throughout the world who like to watch the trailers before a movie. Those are just ads.

I, personally, like watching ads for any new TV shows that fit my viewing habits, or for any new products that I could be interested (cell phones, new TVs, etc). They keep me informed about new products/entertainment that I may have missed otherwise.

I find ads only intrusive when they have nothing to do with me (Tampons commercials, grocery store sales, evony, etc), but any ads that are a) funny or b) apply to me directly cease to be ads, and are more like information.

Just my 2 cents.

For some discussion of HP's research on displays and other electronics printed on plastic sheets see http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/100519.html

Video and other talks are at http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/spring-schedule-20092010... .

Fun fact - they're talking about production runs of 300 square meters at a time.

It looks really neat.

It's interesting that it is on a rig - is it just an automated way of displaying that it can be wrapped round a pencil. Or is it because it has to be kept taught still to work right (I know previous thin OLED/liquid paper displays have had problems when not held taught)

They're bound to have rigs like that around anyway for life testing and such, so using one to automate the demo would seem a pretty natural thing to do, whether or not there's a requirement to hold the material taut.

Video slap bracelets. That is all.

iPad 2.0: roll it up, and put it under your arm. Like a newspaper or an architect's plans.

I wantee.

This is neat, but I'm sort of wondering what value it really is. It would seem that until we have highly flexible batteries, LCD controller chips, and all the other periphery that would have to go with this to make a finished product the applications are somewhat limited.

1. Roll-up phone display to make the pocket size smaller and simultaneously make the usable display size larger.

2. Animated blowout party favors for those $100k+ parties people seem fond of throwing.

- curved displays so you don't have to refocus all the time on a wide screen

- an e-book reader that is just a spine with a roll out display

an e-magazine

A roll-up blind for your windows! Have any weather you like!

The curved display makes sense.

The e-book idea still seems too far out, the battery alone would make the "spine" pretty big, then you'd need room to store the rolled-up display, plus the mechanics/arms/etc. that keep it flat when rolled out.

Apparently it's been done already, see above. So it wasn't that far out :)

Philips made an e-ink reader that does this:

http://gizmodo.com/197227/philips-readius-e+reader-scroll-pr...

So much for me being able to think an original thought.

I don't think the answer lies in making all those components flexible... more likely in just making them smaller.

Batteries may have to go flexible though... you can only store so much energy in a space

On the larger scale, how about a projector screen that doesn't require a projector.

The natural use for this would be a laptop with a netbook form factor and 21" roll-out screen.

Now that 3G is ubiquitous and cheap in the developing world (more so than in the US or Europe even), this is the final piece in the puzzle for truly portable dev on the road. A machine the size of a paperback that you can do real work on while hopping chicken buses across South America.

To me, a roll-out screen implies a certain amount of non-rigidness (unless you're going to make the device weigh 10lbs.). Seems like a 21" screen on a chicken bus (or subway, or plane, etc.) wouldn't be such a great fit.

How about giant scrolls that could be used as blueprints? They could be networked between the contractor on site and the engineers and architects at the office. Currently whenever there's a change in the plan an entire blueprint page must be reprinted and couriered over. Plus, one page could hold the plans for an entire skyscraper.

with new and improved battery tech, how about a bottle of coke wrapped around with something like this, at least promo bottles? Of course, when it reaches a stage of cheap production.

Is sony making this themselves or do they use some other company they own? I'm curious who the big players are in the OLED space, it seems like it's finally getting interesting.

Perhaps a means for making an invisibility cloak, e.g. display the image of your environment on the cloak.

Wouldn't that depend on which direction you are being observed from?

While not 100% invisible, I've always been impressed by this video of an invisibility cloak that was produced in japan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKPVQal851U

Has nobody read Diamond Age, seriously?

I take it you're referring to Hackworth's chopsticks? That was the first thing I thought of when I read the article's title, too.

...it wasn't long before he came up with the idea of selling advertising space on the damn things, chopstick handles and Chinese columnar script being a perfect match. Before long he was presenting it to his superiors: eminently user-friendly bamboid chopsters with colorful advertising messages continuously scrolling up their handles in real time, like news headlines in Times Square.

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