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A thin, pliant screen...
What would you do if you were able to put your most powerful, full color/motion designs and productions almost anywhere? What would change in the way you think about "pages" or "screens" when you're starting to work with a material that can almost completely merge object with imagery? Today's Philadelphia Inquirer has an article about a display being developed by a local company (Universal Display Corporation) that will allow these types of mergers to be explored. Animated .gif courtesy their website.
Glowing wallpaper that replaces light bulbs. A flexible video screen for your shirt cuff. Windshields that flash with driving directions.
A small Ewing, N.J., company is betting millions that such innovations - the stuff of Dick Tracy comics and futuristic films - are just around the corner.
Universal Display Corp. is drawing expertise from engineers and chemists at nearby Princeton University and the University of Southern California to come up with a new generation of video screens: super-thin, flexible, and cheap as dirt.
Such screens, etched transparently onto films of plastic, might retract like a window shade into a device the size of a pen, be form-fitted to a dashboard, replace newspaper, or be slapped onto a cereal box - as in the current Steven Spielberg film, Minority Report, set about 50 years hence.
The material might even be rolled onto walls and ceilings for lighting or to display video murals, said Janice K. Mahon, vice president of commercialization for the company.