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 ]

By Evan Ackerman

The problem with true three dimensional displays (displays that you can walk around) is that they require pixels to be floating in space. This has been done with lasers and plasma, but such technologies are super expensive and limited in many ways. MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory in collaboration with ARES Lab (Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory) has hit upon the idea of creating huge free form three dimensional displays out of individual “smart pixels” made up of micro helicopters carrying LEDs:

Gigantic 3D displays made up of swarms of micro helicopters that can be released into any open space… How awesome is that? More, after the jump.

We’ve talked about the benefits of swarm robotics before over on BotJunkie: it’s relatively cheap because the individual robots are simple, if any one robot breaks it’s easy to replace, and it’s easily scalable since you can just toss more bots into the mix. You can even use swarms to compensate for things like batteries: if you initially launch your robots in waves, you can have a whole other group of standby robots that dynamically replace the performing robots as their batteries run out, flying up with their LEDs off to switch places without anybody noticing.

The tricky part, of course, is getting everything to work together. MIT has big plans for the system, though…

The Flyfire canvas can transform itself from one shape to another or morph a two-dimensional photographic image into an articulated shape. The pixels are physically engaged in transitioning images from one state to another, which allows the Flyfire canvas to demonstrate a spatially animated viewing experience. Flyfire serves as an initial step to explore and imagine the possibilities of this free-form display: a swarm of pixels in a space.

You could even play an HD movie on system… Let me see, to play a movie in 1080p (trying to get it to do 1080i with half the number of bots would be pretty interesting but probably impossible, unless you could get them to do barrel rolls at 60 Hz or something to form the interlacing) you’d need over 2 million micro copters to form the base screen, plus however many more are required to swap out for recharging. Fun to think about, but maybe it would be better to just stick with standard def, since you’d only need about 350,000 bots.

While the video is a rendering, the robots are real enough, and hopefully we can expect to see some live demos of the entire system sometime soon.

[ Flyfire ] VIA [ BotJunkie ]

Remember the I-Tech Virtual Laser Keyboard? It was a little pod-like device you sat on your desk that projected a red virtual keyboard you could actually type on. Well the Light Touch is basically the same idea, but with about 5 years of technological advancement behind it. Instead of just a red keyboard you get an actual full-color, WVGA 10.1-inch virtual touch screen which is powered by the company’s Holographic Laser Projection technology. No DLP here.

The touching part functioned well enough, I mean it was no iPhone, but the infrared technology it was using even allowed for parts of the GUI to be dragged around. However, even in their subtly darkened booth the projected display was kind of washed out, particularly when compared to the results seen from 3M’s and other companies’ latest crop of pico projectors. But the Light Touch is really just a proof of concept anyways since the company has no plans to produce the device themselves, but will be licensing the technology to other OEMs.

[ Light Blue Optics ]

If you’ve got a device capable of pushing a 4K signal, might I suggest picking up one of Panasonic’s lovely 152-inch, 4092×2160 Viera plasma displays? I’ve no idea what one of these would set you back, but I’m going to file it away in my ‘you probably can’t afford it and probably never will’ drawer. Unless I can find a booth giving away 152-inch tote bags that would let me discreetly slip this out of Panasonic’s booth.

A lot of times at CES a company’s booth can be just as fun to play with as their products. And that was definitely the case with Kodak who had this massive interactive multi-touch display featuring a virtual river of products at their booth. Their various devices would come down a waterfall and then slowly drift their way down the river, but at any point you could grab one, drag it to the side, and pull up additional product information.

You could also simply touch the river at any point to get a cool ripple effect (isn’t that a pre-requisite for virtual water?) and at one point I must have counted 14 people interacting with the display at once, with absolutely no slow-down. It’s not always easy to make devices like printers or digital photo frames exciting, but given the crowd around this setup Kodak definitely found a way!

Besides 3D, ebooks and media players, another popular phrase thrown around this year’s CES is multi-touch. And one of the more impressive pieces of multi-touch hardware I’ve seen so far is 3M’s new M2256PW LCD display. Using the company’s ‘projected capacitive technology’ the display is able to recognize up to 10 simultaneous touches, with a response time of less than 15 milliseconds. Now the response time is faster with less touches at one time, but even when using every finger on both hands the display is very, very responsive. I was expecting there to be a lot more lag, but it’s barely even noticeable.

Besides random doodles and sketches, the new 22-inch 1680×1050 pixel resolution display will let you interact with more real-world applications like the Autocad demo 3M was also showing at their booth. But let’s face it, I can’t think of 10 different things I’d need to do at once in a 3D application, or any app for that matter, so the technology seems better suited for larger displays where multiple people could interact with content on-screen at once. However the M2256PW will be available for sale sometime this year.

[ PR - 3M Revolutionizes Multi-touch Interactivity with 10-Finger Touch ]

By David Ponce

German company Citron sure knows how to put the “multi” in multitouch. Where most multitouch systems these days are happy to track 2 points of contact, Citron’s dreaMTouch can track up to 32 simultaneously. It’s neither resistive nor capacitive, but rather uses IR technology which gives it “no special dependency on touch operation medium (stylus, finger, glove, …)”. More specs below:

quick reaction with 50 coordinates per second

optional medium between the display and the user (glass, plastic, air, …)

no shadow spots or blind areas like with other IR multitouches

no drift

no mechanical wear

At this stage Citron is developing this hardware and there are very few software applications using the dearMTouch’s capabilities. Recently, Germany’s Elektrosil partnered with NUITEQ to integrate Snowflake Suite on the dreaMTouch, but that’s about all we know in terms of current software integration. This of course might have something to do with the fact that dreaMTouch won’t officially be commercially available until January 2010. The system is awaiting patent approval.

[ The dreaMTouch ] VIA [ Technabob ]

By Evan Ackerman

Remember back when the display in Minority Report was the future technology that everyone was talking about? Well, now it’s the past, ’cause MIT’s Media Lab has come up with a display that can potentially do all that fancy gestural stuff, except without the gloves.

Called BiDi (for Bi-Directional), the display works on a very basic level a little bit like a Microsoft Surface table: there’s a screen, and behind that, there are cameras (of a sort) to watch what’s going on at the screen. And also like Surface, because cameras are in use as opposed to just a touch panel, the display is sensitive to actions that don’t directly contact it. Where the MIT display really takes the cake, though, is that it uses a field of optical sensors embedded in the display combined with some fancy image processing to make a detailed three dimensional map of exactly how far things are from the display, which not only allows you to make recognizable gestures much farther from the surface, but also allows you to gesture in and out. The LCD alternates back and forth very quickly between displaying and image and capturing data (sort of like Microsoft’s SecondLight Surface mod), and it does it so quickly that all you see is the image itself.

MIT says that they’re trying to steer away from novelty applications a bit, which is sad, but they hope to “inspire” LCD manufacturers to start working on this stuff. So, you know who you are: GET INSPIRED. I want one of these.

[ MIT ] VIA [ Engadget ]

By Evan Ackerman

Inside this rather large box comes a rather small USB powered display. The Luma Labs UD7 Gadget Display has a 1.5″ screen, which is small enough that you can’t really display much of anything on it. Essentially, it’s a lot like a single button from the Optimus Mini Three, in that it’s not designed to act as a secondary display, but rather as the primary display for a variety of widgets. You’ve got options like clocks, system monitors, timers, games, and even Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s kinda cute and potentially useful, and at only $30, totally easy to rationalize.

[ Gadget Display ] VIA [ SlashGear ]

By Colin Ackerman

That sweet looking curvy display we first saw at CES back in 2008 is finally available to consumers with too much money to spend, only about a year late. For a mere $6500, you can be the proud owner of the Ostendo CRVD, a curved 43″ 2880 x 900 quad-DLP rear projection monitor. Ostendo says that most of the units have been sold to the military for simulators and stuff, but this is what it’s really for:

and this:

[ Ostendo ] VIA [ Engadget ]