I’m not sure if referring to your company’s new display technology as ‘magic’ is the best approach. It makes me envision Sony’s R&D department as a bunch of wizards in the basement of a castle, flailing their wands about, trying to conjure up new gear and technologies. But that’s exactly what the company has done with their new ‘WhiteMagic’ LCD display technology which in essence adds a white pixel to the standard red, blue and green mix. Resulting in a new RGBW TFT LCD display.

In the past, adding another neutral pixel to this mix would result in image quality being degraded. But the real innovation here is a new signal processing algorithm, developed by the company, which analyzes the image data and makes suitable adjustments to remedy the problem. What you’re left with is a 3-inch VGA res display which reduces the power consumption of the backlight by 50%, while keeping it as visibly bright as a standard RGB LCD. It also facilitates a display that’s twice as bright as today’s LCDs, while using the same amount of power, making them easier to see outdoors in bright sunlight.

[ PR - Sony has commercialized "WhiteMagic" a 3-inch VGA LCD module incorporating the newly-developed ‘RGBW method’ for digital cameras ] VIA [ Fareastgizmos ]

And today’s award for ‘Display Technology That Will Most Certainly Never Catch On’ goes to Mitchell F. Chan’s The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha art piece which uses rings of water vapor as pixels to spell out Miguel de Cervantes Savaedra’s book of the same name. The rings are generated by an array of ultrasonic transducers in a bucket of water controlled by an Arduino. The sounds they produce are out of the range of human hearing, but produce tiny airborne water droplets which are then propelled upwards using another set of speakers producing subsonic sounds instead.

The video below shows the whole thing in action, but be warned, it’s not terribly exciting. Since it can only produce a single letter at a time, Mitchell says it will take approximately an entire year to spell out the entire book.

[ Mitchell F. Chan - The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha ] VIA [ Make ]

Coca-Cola took a page from the ‘Go Big Or Go Home’ book to celebrate their 125th anniversary. They hired a company called Obscura Digital to turn all 4 sides of their Atlanta HQ building into a giant 26 story tall projection screen. All in all that amounts to over 200,000 square feet of projection surface. The setup also appears to use multiple projectors on the ground for each side, seamlessly lined up to create one giant animation.

The 2 hour show, which incorporates “transitioning narrative and cinematic pieces” as well as social media elements like photos uploaded to Coca-Cola’s Facebook page, runs every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night in May from 9 to 11pm. And according to the project’s page on the Obscura Digital website, the CO2 footprint of the event “is offset through Georgia’s Valley Wood Carbon Sequestration Project.”

[ Obscura Digital - Coca-Cola 125th Anniversary Large Scale Projection Display ] VIA [ PSFK ]

Tradeshows are always a sea of deafening music, product demos and flashy videos. So if you want your booth to stand out and draw in the crowds, you really have to do something unique. So at the CeBIT 2011 show in Hanover, Microsoft Germany called upon a company called Stereolize to cook up what they dubbed ‘Microsoft Cinema’ which was essentially a monstrous, 234-inch touchscreen display.

It towered over the presenters, so we’re just going to have to assume and trust that the touch functionality goes all the way to the top of the display, but at least we know the bottom half supports gestures like flicking and panning. And presumably instead of pinching to zoom, you’d have to give the whole thing a gigantic, open-armed hug.

[ Stereolize - CeBIT 2011 – The largest Interactive Touch Screen – 234" ] VIA [ I Started Something ]

It’s not the first USB-powered, portable external display designed to complement a laptop, but Toshiba’s new Mobile Monitor is now officially the one to beat, at least when it comes to size and price.

At 14-inches with a widescreen resolution of 1366×768 it’s actually useful for more than just monitoring a Twitter feed or docking a couple of Photoshop palettes. Of course in terms of color fidelity and contrast you’re probably not going to want to rely on it for color critical work if you are using it for Photoshop, but for a bit of extra screen real estate while stuck on a laptop for on-set work like a photoshoot, it looks pretty slick.

In terms of brightness the Mobile Monitor maxes out at 220 nits, but that requires the use of an optional AC adapter. So if you just stick with a single USB cable for power and connectivity for convenience’ sake, you’ll have to settle for a slightly dimmer display, but I’m sure it won’t be an issue for most users. All in all it weighs in at just under 3lbs, includes a handy carrying case that turns into a stand, and is available now for just $199.99.

[ Toshiba Mobile Monitor ]

The next time you’re out shopping for a gigantic new flat-screen TV to impress your friends, don’t forget that sometimes big things come in little packages. Sure, a 100+ inch monster taking up 80% of your living room would be eye-catching, but what if you flipped on the big game and it magically appeared like a hologram inside a 3.9-inch crystal ball sitting on your coffee table instead? That would be impressive too right?

Well probably not, but at the least it’s oozing with novelty charm. That’s probably why the Japan Trend Shop recommends it as signage or advertising for stores, pubs or even a reception desk. It’s got a basic video-in connection so it can actually display video from a DVD player or other source, not just static images. But, the whopping $4,909 price tag is probably going to produce more spit-takes than sales.

[ Holoart Crystal Display Ball ] VIA [ Random Good Stuff ]

If you’ve transitioned to a high-performance laptop, or like to keep your computer tower hidden away, Moneual Lab’s newest case won’t be of much use to you. But if you still prefer to have it sitting on your desk right next to your monitor, then their DSPC, or Dual Screen PC case, which they unveiled at CES will be most useful to you.

Technical details are a bit sparse on the Moneual Lab website at the moment, but as you can see the tower-style case sports a tall and slender LCD display which can be used as a second monitor to display widgets, tickers, toolbars or other apps that don’t require loads of screen real estate. I’ve no idea what the resolution is, but according to a CES press release the DSPC case will tentatively be available in Q3 of this year for ~$1,500.

[ CES 2011 Innovations Honorees - Moneual Lab's DSPC Case ] VIA [ Chip Chick ]

I’m still a bit bummed about Canon’s recent announcement that they’re officially throwing in the towel on their SED display technology, but life goes on, and it looks like OLEDs are shaping up to be a suitable replacement, and then some. Today Sony announced they’ve developed a “super-flexible 80 μm-thick 4.1-in 121 ppi OTFT*1-driven full color OLED display” that can actually be wrapped around a cylinder with a radius of just 4mm, and even stretched, while still playing full-motion video! If you’re interested in the technical aspects of how the display was created, I’d recommend checking out Sony’s official press release, but the rest of us will probably be content to just ooh and aah at the video I’ve included below.

If you happen to be in Seattle on May 27 while attending the 2010 SID symposium you’ll apparently have a chance to see the display in person, but as for the rest of us, it’s easily going to be a few years before this technology even begins to trickle into consumer products. But, it’s clearly yet another nail in black and white e-ink’s coffin.

[ PR - Sony Develops a "Rollable" OTFT*1-driven OLED Display that can wrap around a Pencil ] VIA [ Akihabara News ]

It definitely comes across as a gimmick more than anything, but Medea Spirits’ Vodka bottles now come wrapped in a blue LED scrolling pixel display that can be programmed with up to 6 messages, each up to 255 characters in length. I guess it’s a bit slicker than just hanging a gift tag on it, and while the built-in battery will last up to a year, you can only get about 40 hours of scrolling display time with it. And apparently the programming mode is extra battery hungry, so make sure you plan out exactly what you want to say ahead of time. ~$40.

[ Medea Vodka ] VIA [ Luxist ]

By Evan Ackerman

This is a prototype e-reader from Qualcomm called Mirasol. Apparently, this vivid color display (which doesn’t use a backlight) consumes less power than a monochrome e-ink display:

More, after the jump.

How can this work? Well, if they’re talking about the blue morpho (which is the spectacular butterfly in the pic), there really is some fascinating biotechnology there. The butterfly isn’t actually colored blue, in that it doesn’t have blue pigment in its wings. Rather, the wings of the butterfly are covered with tiny scales that reflect incoming light, setting up constructive interference effects at a wavelength at about 400 nanometers, which happens to be blue light. You can get any color you want by varying the size of the scales, which changes the wavelength at which constructive interference happens.

As far as the display goes, the advantage of the butterfly technology is that color is produced from incoming light, which means that you don’t need LEDs (or whatever) to provide light from underneath the display. Of course, it’ll only work if there’s enough ambient light, but that’s just like a real piece of paper (and conventional e-ink displays). Except with pretty colors. I don’t know about you, but I’d be more than willing to pay a premium (even a significant premium) for a display like this… Let’s hope that Qualcomm comes through.

VIA [ CrunchGear ]