Breakthrough in nanostructure technology for real-time color display | Hacker News Reader

Breakthrough in nanostructure technology for real-time color display

phys.org

70 pointswglb22 comments

I remember reading about the Lycurgus cup (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycurgus_Cup) years ago in college. Pretty cool we can now control the phenomena.

Highly, highly doubt this will result in a commercial competitor to OLED one day, but who knows? Perhaps there will be a path here towards translucent displays...

The idea behind this is not new.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/yetisen/files/morpho_butte...

MEMS display?

Apple has taken over Qualcomm's IMOD Mirasol display lab in Taiwan and has been dead ever since.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/15/12/15/apple-has-taken-o...

"the size and color of micro-nanostructures adapt to fluctuations in alcohol concentration or pH value"

Varying them quickly enough is the remaining part of the problem.

Hmm... at that small of a scale, I'll bet you could change the localized pH near an electrode pretty fast with a reversible electrolysis reaction, given the proper choice of electrolyte(s).

From the article, the sizes they're talking about are 10 um pixels, or 10 um pitch, so approximately 2540 ppi. [1] Pretty respectable by modern standards, as Wikipedia says a lot of phones are ~600 ppi. [2] The demo was 3 mm pixels, so not quite as impressive.

Not sure what the refresh or contrast are, as the summary was really light on actual meaningful numbers. If somebody has the paper from something other than a paywall, maybe it has more.

The shape changing part might be neat, depending on how much shape changing there is, and how difficult it is to achieve. Maybe piezo style pixels or something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dots_per_inch

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_density

I am struggling to imagine where to use such a massive resolution, well beyond the best human eyes.

As a photographer I can see some use in electronic viewfinders maybe, but in general pro / semipro photography is in long term decline, way too many enthusiasts (including me) ditched their heavy full frames for mere top phones and never looked back (for me its general shift into parenthood and lack of time for all that annoying processing too, I perform all I ever needed in phone in few taps and for more detailed work Samsung's built in pen is above great).

VR headsets want emissive displays but can make use of extremely high dpi on the display element itself.

What you're describing is what most of the camera manufacturers are dealing with. There's not really "that" much to sell to people any longer, because you can get a "good enough" camera that will fit on a quarter.

Nikon for example, just bought Red One because (in my opinion) there's not much left in the consumer handheld market for DLSRs fighting with cell phones. [1] At least with the current development trajectory on both fronts.

In terms of what might matter, other than prior comments VR suggestion, TVs. People always gonna want their 2x TV. Same as the Bill Gates argument from 20 years ago. What are people gonna do with all that storage? Make larger videos. (likely porn).

[1] https://www.nikon.com/company/news/2024/0307_01.html

>People always gonna want their 2x TV.

I think 8k is pretty much the limit for plausible consumer screen size and viewing distance. Few people are going to want a tv large enough that a higher resolution is useful.

I believe that's the size of the individual particles, not the expected pixel size. The particles will still need to self-assemble which (I suspect) requires larger numbers of particles.

An analogy might be quantum dots, which are nano-scale structures, but each micro-scale pixel uses many dots.

I hate to break it to these people, but we've had real time color displays for a while now :D

Real-time color emissive displays. This work is about reflective displays. (e-ink)

Can’t quantum dots not be used in reflective displays as well?

How do you update the dots when the image changes?

Color e-ink

Great! I personally would better like a breakthrough in their pricing though :-)

The very reason I would like an a eink display is its lofi-ness, lack of real-time visual effect bells&wistles. To calm down and work with my emails, spreadsheets and mind maps like if I were reading and typing on plain paper. So I don't really need "real time". I would buy a huge one (like 49-inch 4K to fit a lot on one screen) but even an ordinary size costs much, let alone so big :-(

That's not EPD though, that's more like IMOD/Mirasol back in the day. It manipulates color by restructuring so it will always have the same limitations as MEMS displays like IMOD. The picture in the article gives an impression on poor viewing angles on this thing.

We're finally inching closer to that color-changing finger nail polish from Total Recall.

Not to mention the singing cereal boxes of Minority Report.

That was The Fifth Element!

No, it was total recall. The Fifth Element had a box thing that painted the secretary's nails. Not necessarily the same thing, could just be a little nail robot inside it. Total recall had the tap to change color feature.

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