Screens

NFL football fans will no doubt be familiar with Mitsubishi's world-record HD displays at Dallas Cowboy's stadium, the largest measuring 22 m high by 49 m wide on the sidelines. This week the company announced the installation of another enormous Diamond Vision screen, this time at Hakodate Racecourse at home in Japan. Read More

The gestural interface used by Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report was based on work by MIT Media Lab’s Hiroshi Ishii, who has already commercialized similar large-scale gestural interface systems. However, such systems comprise many expensive cameras or require the user to wear tracking devices on their fingers. To develop a similar yet cost effective gestural interface system that is within reach of many more people other researchers at MIT have instead been working to develop screens with embedded optical sensors to track the movement of the user’s fingers that could quickly make touch screens seem outdated. Read More

Anyone who has tried to use a multi-touch touchscreen with anything other than their bare skin will know that it’s just not possible, no matter how hard you press. That’s because the capacitance technology used for the bulk of multi-touch devices doesn’t detect pressure, but measures the changes in electrical resistance caused by contact with a conductor – in this case, the human body. That might be annoying in cold climates, but is an even bigger problem in situations that require the wearing of protective gloves. Getac’s line of rugged Tablet PCs will be the first commercially-available rugged computers to solve this problem by offering a multi-touch screen that works with or without gloves. Read More

Forget high definition, AMD claims its ATI Eyefinity multi-screen technology has up to 12 times 1080p resolution, breaking into almost true eye-definition video quality. It's able to power up to six monitors from one card, is Windows 7 ready and positively champing at the bit to unleash the power of Direct X 11. Users can look forward to a much improved immersion gaming experience, or to taking advantage of one huge desktop workspace for better multi-task management, or to being able to keep an eye on breaking Internet news while also playing a game or watching a DVD. Read More

Pixel Qi has given a glimpse of its 3Qi hybrid display that combines three separate modes: black-and-white, e-paper and full-color. The 3Qi is planned for release in late-2009 and will feature a 10.1-inch diagonal screen suited for mini-laptops and ebook readers. Read More

Could the end be nigh for plasma and LCD screens? Seiko Epson has recently announced a further development in ink-jet technology, which does away with some of the problems still dogging the much-vaunted organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology. In particular, Seiko Epson has signaled it is moving toward a 37-inch HD OLED screen by creating a uniform deposit of organic material while removing the uneven layering of the ink-jet method. Read More