c o v e r s t o r y Consumer The Future of Displays The desire for better display technology is insatiable and the future of display technologies seems to be strange like fiction. Flat screens, curved screens, 4K displays, what next? Know more about the future trends for displays - Anuj Sharma lexible, rollable are only of a few things that are heating up and speeding up. At the same time head-mounted displays and augmented reality Fare more advanced form of display technologies that will shape the future of displays. Also, manufacturers such as Samsung and LG are racing to build next-generation of displays in an effort to scale up screens to the point where they can support the sizes demanded by the TV market.

Flexible display devices to capture the market 1. technology to become mainstream Flexible Displays are different from the more prevalent in smart phones traditional flat screen displays used in most electronics 2. Head-mounted displays to play a major role in devices. In the recent years there has been a growing Virtual Reality Games interest for flexible displays. Majority of consumer 3. Expect more 8K (16 times more pixels than 1080p) electronics manufacturers are using this display in TVs to be launched consumer electronics and it seems to be the next big thing in smart phone displays. The underlying technology that makes flexible displays possible is . OLEDs have been available for several years mostly in mobile devices transparent. The flexible display is a big innovation in the and use plastic substrate instead of glass substrate. By smart phone industry and it will inspire more revolutionary using a film-type encapsulation technique and gluing designs in mobile phones. the protective film to the back of the panel, the panel becomes flexible and virtually unbreakable. Due to changes Rollable display to be introduced in smart devices in the screen shape and creation of innovative design concepts, breakthrough will be made with mobile phone components. Motherboards, antennas, and batteries will all be downsized. They might also become foldable or

A Samsung Flexible AMOLED Screen Smartphone Prototype

Sony’s Rollable OLED Screen Prototype

The flat panel screens are being used widely since more than a decade. There has been a demand in display technology focusing on developing a lighter, thinner product which is easier to carry and store. It is a form of flexible display that can be rolled up into a scroll. Technologies involved in building a rollable display include

36 PCQuest DECEMBER 2014 pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] electronic ink, Gyricon, and OLED. Rollable displays have moving the head without the need for a separate con- many advantages over the glass displays including better troller to change the angle of the imagery. HMDs can durability, lighter weight, thinner dimensions, and can be also be integrated with Eye and Hand Tracking Systems. perfectly curved or rolled up. Also the display area of a Eye tracking can be useful in a variety of contexts such rollable display can be bigger than the device itself. It can as user interface navigation - by sensing the user’s gaze, be used in many devices such as laptops, PDA’s, smart a computer can change the information displayed on a phones, a wearable gadgets etc. screen, bring additional details to attention, etc. Hand Tracking allows for natural interaction with content and Head-Mounted Display market is set to expand a convenient game-play mechanism and can play a big- A head-mounted display or helmet mounted display, ger role in playing simulation, FPS Games. abbreviated HMD, is a , worn on the head or as part of a helmet, that has a small display optic in 8K is the next big thing front of one (monocular HMD) or each eye (binocular HMD). The screen may be either CRT, LCD or OLED etc. There is another variant of HMD known as Optical HMD and has the capability of reflecting projected images and allowing the user to see through it. The capability of reflecting projected images comes through an optical mixer integrated into an Optical HMD which is constituted of partly silvered mirrors. These displays have a variety of applications in augmented reality, aviation, military, medicine, sports, simulation etc. HMD can also revolutionize the video-gaming industry. Some of the HMD displays are available in the market including Oculus Rift, Sony HMZ-T3W etc but these are some mainstream devices that the consumers are acquainted to and will evolve in near future. Some HMD You all must have heard the hot buzz 4K in recent times vendors integrate the device with on-board operating and also must have seen the 4K displays in almost every systems such as Android, allowing applications to run electronics store. Now the big gets bigger and here is 8k locally on HMD, thereby eliminating the need to be for you. It is the highest ultra high definition television connected to an external device to generate video. (UHDTV) resolution to exist in the digital television These are sometimes referred to as Smart Goggles. and digital cinematography. 8K refers to the horizontal resolution of these formats, which are all in the order of 8,000 pixels, forming the total image dimensions (7680x4320). It is a display resolution that may eventually be the successor to 4K resolution. 8K FUHD has four times the horizontal and vertical resolution of the 1080p HDTV format, with sixteen times as many pixels, overall. As of now, 4K is believed to become a mainstream standard in televisions by 2017. Regular broadcasting of 8K signals could begin in around 2018, according to the Next Generation Television & Broadcasting Promotion Forum (NexTV-F), a Tokyo-based consortium for 4K, 8K and other standards. The world’s first 8K television was unveiled by Sharp at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in 2013. Head-mounted displays may also be used with Although 8K will not be a mainstream resolution tracking sensors that allow changes in the angle and anytime soon, some manufacturers are pushing for 8K orientation to be recorded. When such data is available cameras to get better 4K footage. Through a process called in the system computer, it can be used to generate the downsampling, a higher resolution 8K image downsampled appropriate computer-generated imagery (CGI) for the to 4K, can create a sharper picture with richer colors than angle-of-look at the particular time. This allows the user a 4K camera would be able to accomplish on its own with a to ‘look around’ a virtual reality environment simply by lower resolution sensor. pcquest.com twitter.com/pcquest facebook.com/pcquest linkd.in/pcquest [email protected] DECEMBER 2014 PCQuest 37