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Simple Transparent Display System Could Be Applied As Thin Plastic Coating

MIT researchers have developed a new approach to transparent displays that would offer many advantages over current technology. Many "heads-up" display systems use a mirror or beam-splitter to project an image directly into the user's eyes, making it appear that the display is hovering in space. These systems have a limited angle of view because the eyes must be in the right position. With the new system, the image appears on the glass itself, and can be seen from a wide array of angles. Other transparent displays use electronics integrated into the glass - organic light-emitting diodes for the display, and transparent electronics to control them. These systems can be complex and expensive, and their transparency is limited. In MIT's new system, resonant nanoparticles are embedded in a transparent polymer. These particles can be tuned to scatter only certain wavelengths, colors, or light, while letting all the rest pass through.

Topics:
Coatings & Adhesives Displays/Monitors/HMIs Imaging Materials Nanotechnology Photonics Plastics

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    Transcript

    00:00:05 Currently there are a few different transparent display technologies and each of them is suitable for a different set of applications. These include organic transparent displays, reflecting displays as well as fluorescent displays. What we're trying to achieve is something that is particularly simple to

    00:00:24 implement and is fairly cheap and scaleable. So typically you either project images onto a white piece of wall which does the purpose because it scatters light but it is not transparent; light cannot go through. Or you have a piece of glass where light goes through but you cannot project any images onto it. So

    00:00:45 if we can actually project images onto glasses then it will enable much more opportunities. For example you can now project onto a window of a store so I can display information of the products inside. Or you can project images onto an office window or on the windows of subway trains. So the way we

    00:01:06 went to implement this is we embedded resonant nano-particles into a polymer. So you can think of it as a plastic foil and these nano-particles are implemented such that they reflect only certain, particular colors. In our case, the one that we demonstrated was a blue color. So it will strongly

    00:01:26 reflect that particular color but all the other colors will go through. Therefore our transparent screen is simply a sheet of transparent plastic with some nano-particles in it. And you can take this sheet of plastic and put it onto a glass and then this glass will still be transparent but you will be

    00:01:45 able to project images onto it. For the future we plan to make the screen even more transparent for the colors that we do not target. And also we plan to extend this method so that it can display multiple colors, specifically red, green and blue so that you will be able to show a full color image. Since this

    00:02:08 is a relatively simple method and it is really cheap to make these plastic foils that display, we can envision that in the future people will just go to convenience stores to buy this piece of plastic, go home and just put it onto their windows or wherever they want to project images and then will

    00:02:29 be able to turn that transparent glass into something useful that can display.