Found on the Way Home from Display Week 2012

While returning home from Display Week, I noticed a large interactive digital sign offering game play in the San Francisco airport. The sign (pictured below) is made up of nine tiled 46-in. LCDs. The touch system is optical multi-touch, with cameras and scanning lasers mounted in a protruding circular housing visible at the top center of the sign.



(Photo by Author)

The object of the game was to match eight pairs of simple icons as quickly as possible (the boat outline above the “Touch to Start” instructions is an example of the icons). It sounds easy, but I found it to be surprisingly difficult. I tried the game four times, and the best time I could achieve was 1 minute and 8 seconds. The “Time to beat” was 25 seconds. I suspect that that time was produced by multiple people playing simultaneously (the touch system is multi-touch, after all). Every time I played it, people stopped to watch, but nobody volunteered to join me.

The supplier of the sign is Monster Media, a leader in non-traditional advertising. The video montage on its home page is well worth watching; it runs at least a couple of minutes before repeating. One curious aspect of this particular sign is that it never showed any advertising; perhaps it was between campaigns.--Geoff Walker, Walker Mobile

Touch-Screen Buttons with No Touch Screen

Azoteq, a South African fabless chip company exhibiting in the Quinn Pacific booth, is showing a very clever application of capacitive proximity-sensing. In the photo below, the buttons across the bottom of the screen would normally be implemented via a touch-screen; actually they’re implemented by sensing pads in the opaque bezel below the screen. The sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio of the Azoteq proximity-sensing chip are so high that touching the on-screen buttons is indistinguishable from touching real touch-screen buttons, even though the actual sensors are more than an inch away.



















(Photo by Author)

This allows virtual touch-screen functionality to be implemented in devices such as printers, copiers, ATMs, VoIP phones, and point-of-sale devices at extremely low cost – because there’s no touch screen! The exact shape of the proximity-sensing field can be controlled so that only the button shapes are active; touching above, below or between the buttons has no effect. The proximity-sensing chip can also be used to wake up the device, thereby reducing standby power consumption. This is only one specific application of Azoteq’s proximity-sensing and user-interface technology; contact Azoteq (or Quinn Pacific, which is offering Azoteq’s patent portfolio for sale) for more information. -- Geoff Walker, Walker Mobile

Stantum’s Newest Digital-Resistive Touch-Panel

Stantum has partnered with Nissha Printing in Japan to create an updated version of Stantum’s iVSM (Interpolated Voltage-Sensing Matrix) digital-resistive touch-panel technology called “Fine Touch Z”. The primary change is the addition of the transparent, pressure-sensing material made by Peratech in the UK. (See the article in the January 2012 issue of Information Display for a detailed look at Peratech’s quantum-tunneling technology.) A typical Fine Touch Z sensor consists of a PET substrate patterned with the ITO columns, a layer of Peratech’s material only a few microns thick, and a PET cover-sheet printed with cover-glass decoration and patterned with the ITO rows. The cover sheet has a 9H hardcoat, which may be the first time this level of durability has been available in any resistive touch-panel. Sensors will be available in the 5-in. to 12-in. range. In current prototypes there is a small air-gap containing a few extremely small spacer dots between the Peratech material and the cover-sheet; Stantum and Nissha intend to refine the sensor manufacturing process to eliminate the need for the air-gap.

The row & column spacing of the iVSM digital matrix hasn’t changed; it’s still around 1.5 mm, which produces excellent high-resolution handwriting.An additional improvement is a significant reduction in the minimum activation force; it’s now only 2 or 3 grams, which is essentially indistinguishable from p-cap’s “zero gram” activation force. The primary advantage of Stantum’s iVSM core technology is the ability to use simultaneous finger and passive stylus with only a single sensor; adding the Peratech pressure-sensing material adds z-axis sensitivity with 256 levels. This allows the stylus to produce very fine artwork with varying line widths, or capture the full dynamics of a signature. Nissha’s substantial touch-panel manufacturing resources should allow Stantum’s technology to be much more readily accessible in prototyping and production volumes; this has been somewhat of a problem in the past due to Stantum’s IP-licensing-only business model. The photo below shows a sample sensor produced by Nissha; note the extremely narrow borders in spite of the high node-count required by 1.5 mm squares. --Geoff Walker, Walker Mobile





















Photo by author

Applications Abound in E Ink’s Booth at Display Week

E Ink, the company that dominates the front-plane electrophoretic e-book reader (EBR) space, strutted its stuff this year at Display Week with an impressive booth that showed off a myriad of applications from conventional EBRs to low-power emergency public signage (think critical tsunami escape route data) operating under no-power disaster conditions.

It’s about the huge number of possible applications, and demonstrating what E Ink partners have done to solve everyday problems with low-power, always-on display solutions that are daylight readable, rugged, and most importantly, green, as Director of Product Management Giovanni Mancini told us.

New at the show were faster next-generation color displays, EBRs with front-lights for night-time reading, and cool unique implementations like a retail case lock with built-in display features, plus the latest driver chip technology from partners like Epson, who just announced a low-power SoC (S1D13M01) that features a MIPS-24 Kef CPU core with display controller that is optimized for next-generation reader and tablet devices.

E Ink’s booth was a real stand-out on the show floor. Unlike most companies that filled the space with ribbon cabled electronic components wired to the latest prototypes, the company instead chose to feature cool new product concepts that highlight just how creative designers can get with electronic ink. For example, for the E Ink display products targeting daylight readability, the company filled a portion of the booth with ambient-bright sunlight using special stage lighting to help show off the true capabilities of its electronic ink technology. Display ruggedness was almost understated, with E Ink panels built into a “cross-walk” demo, right on the booth floor. You’re suddenly hit with the notion that this stuff is so robust, you can walk on it, directed by – yep, you guessed it – a low-power E Ink stop light that uses the reflective power of the sun, saving both energy and cost by drastically reducing the number of high-bright LEDs needed to direct traffic.

We were told that kudos should go to Jenn Vail, Sr. Manager of Marketing at E Ink, who achieved a zen-like, almost museum-quality exhibit for the show with an open architecture design and elements of Feng Shui energy flow that invited-in the show goers to sample the next wave in electrophoretic displays. One last note: true to its innovation heritage, E Ink sponsored the wildly popular Innovation Zone. or I-Zone for short, at Display Week this year. This was a hit of the show, bringing in emerging technology of all types that normally wouldn’t have an opportunity for this kind of mass exposure. Well done. - Steve Sechrist

Addendum

It's been four years since I first set foot on the exhibit floor of Display Week, and one of the first people I met was E Ink VP Sri Peruvemba, who was patient enough to explain to me not only what his company did but the background of the entire e-Reader market.

Back then, the booth was a sea of monochrome products, with perhaps one or two color prototypes. These days, as color e-Paper takes off, E Ink's booth has become a more colorful place. It's exciting to see a technology evolve like this one has.

As ID reporter Steve Sechrist notes above, E Ink's booth was extremely well-designed (and also a big attention-getter, judging from the number of people crowding around it) and the company had lots of cool concept products to show, including a waterproof kayak display and a display for a handheld drill. Below is a picture of Sri Peruvemba (left) and me in front of the aforementioned E Ink stoplight. -- Jenny Donelan, Information Display

Samsung's Crowd Control and (Very) Pretty Pictures

Kudos to Samsung for its thoughtfully designed 55-in. OLED TV exhibit at this year's show. Of course, it would be hard to make a 55-in. OLED TV look bad, but what was great about this setup was how Samsung showed three of the panels in three different implementations, and also controlled the flow of onlookers – it can be difficult to get a good look at a popular product like this on the show floor.

As shown in the picture below, the viewing queue (helpfully delineated with arrows on the floor), moved behind a roped-off area from the dual-view (at right), to the 2D view (middle) and finally to the 3D view (left). Friendly attendants stood by to answer questions – or perhaps to wake you up in case you ended up transfixed by the more-luscious-than-life imagery on the screens.

The dual-view implementation allows two viewers to watch--and hear--completely different content on the same screen. Both 2D and 3D views were spectacular. --Jenny Donelan, Information Display

LG Shows 4.5-inch AS3D Mobile Display Using Eye-Tracking

Beyond the groundbreaking 55-inch AMOLED TV shown in the LG booth, the company is also featuring a new 4.5-inch AS-3D display that uses eye tracking to deliver what it calls Viewing Angle Free 3D. Panel brightness/ resolution is 500cd/m2 /720 x 1280 in 2D and the display also delivers a 220 cd/m2 at 720 x 640 pixel image in AS-3D mode. The display prototype comes in a package with a camera mounted for eye-tracking /face detection, which LG Vice President BK Kim, head of the IT Mobile Development group, told us has less than 0.5% cross talk (center) and offers a viewing angle of 48-degrees in both h and v directions at a viewing distance of 30 to 35 cm.

Beyond this proof-of-concept prototype, the group plans to develop a 7- to 10-inch commercial display to target AS3D for the tablet market. Games are a natural fit, and the booth demo featured a compelling 3D game view that really showed off the technology. – Steve Sechrist

Qualcomm Shows mirasol HD Color Display

At Display Week this year, Qualcomm showed off its latest mirasol display prototype, a ground breaking 4.3-inch module in 1280 x 720 (HD) resolution with a 343 ppi (retinal-class) display capable of full motion video (30Hz.)

mirasol’s director of engineering, Pavan Mulabagal told us the prototype device will be sampling soon to select OEM customers looking for color, outdoor readability, always-on functionality in a “green” package.

The high-density pixel configuration is in-line with the current trends moving toward retinal-class displays, found in just about all mobile display devices going forward. That, coupled with inherent low power and full motion video support, make the mirasol reflective technology “a perfect fit for the move to color e-book readers," Mulabagal noted.

The mirasol display technology took the Display of the Year Silver Award at Display Week for recognition of its bright sunlight readability and low battery power requirements. Qualcomm also recently made the MIT Technology Review’s 2012 TR50 List for commercial innovations most likely to change lives around the world. mirasol’s marketing director Elisabeth Eller told us that with commercial products using the Mmirasol display already shipping in Asia, the launch of this HD prototype brings the company to a key milestone in its march toward bringing this low-power, daylight readable display to the mainstream. – Steve Sechrist

Roll Up for Corning’s New Willow Glass

Corning is showing off its new Willow glass at SID DisplayWeek 2012. The glass is similar to the company’s familiar Eagle glass that is used as substrates for LCD panels and other display applications. The big difference is that Willow is thin: really thin. It is just 100 microns thick, which is about the same as a sheet of paper.

The glass is produced using Corning’s fusion method, which gives it the smooth surface and uniform thickness that makes other Corning glass so well-suited for flat-panel display production. The fact that the glass is so thin, however, means that it can be bent without breaking. It also is much lighter than the thicker versions. The result is a glass that can be rolled up on spools, and that is light enough to make it practical to ship to customers around the world. Corning is making Willow glass in its Kentucky plant. The glass can be made up to 1 meter wide, and up to 300 meters can fit on a single spool.



While the glass can be used as sheets in traditional batch processing, it can also be used in roll-to-roll production. This probably won’t be continuous processing in most cases, though some coatings could be applied this way. Instead, it will probably be used for “step and repeat” production, which still promises to be much more efficient that the current practice of batch processing individual sheets of substrate.

Willow glass also is a good barrier for air and water vapor, which makes it attractive as a layer to encapsulate thin-film solar cells as well as OLED displays. It also tolerates high temperature processes which would cause flexible plastic substrates to stretch, buckle, or melt. – Alfred Poor, HDTV

Exciting E-paper Papers

In terms of e-paper, unlike last year's Display Week, this year it is not as much about prototypes on the floor as as it is about the sessions. There are numerous papers showing major gains in reflective brightness and greatly improved color. Fuji presented -- and demonstrated at author interviews with a 3-4 deep crowd of people -- a multi-color particle electrophoretic display that showed dramatically improved color. The paper was given by Hiji-san of Fuji, whom we have seen present innovative e-paper technologies for numerous years at Display Week. CMY color generation seems to be gaining momentum (HP, Ricoh, and now Fuji.)

Some further e-paper excitement later this week: HP's late-news paper (Thursday 2:30, 52.4) on electrokinetic technology has a provocative title: "Ultra-Low-Power Reflective Display with World’s Best Color". This will be interesting because what they will present is a 3-layer display using oxide-TFTs. – Jason Heikenfeld

TouchTurns: A US-Based P-Cap Module Startup

TouchTurns, a nine-person projected-capacitive (p-cap) touch module startup in Santa Clara, CA, is going after a market that is without question currently underserved: commercial p-cap applications in the US. TouchTurns’ differentiation derives from several interesting aspects, as follows:

1. The particular sensor being exhibited by TouchTurns (in 3.5”, 5” and 7” sizes) uses a single layer of ITO without bridges or metal routing traces, yet it uses mutual capacitance, not self-capacitance. This is accomplished by running drive electrodes vertically down the sensor and forming individual sense pads in a column beside each drive electrode. This also allows the sensor to be borderless on three sides! The photo below shows a close-up of the FPC on the top edge of a 3.5-inch sensor; you can see from the trace pattern that there are 10 drive electrodes and 15 sense electrodes per drive electrode.







Photo by author

2. The sensor is built on a substrate of Corning’s 0.1 mm “Willow” glass, using laser ablation for patterning (no photolithography!). Laminating the sensor to a 0.5 mm cover-glass with 0.1 mm of OCA yields a total stackup of 0.7 mm. This is about the same thickness as a “sensor-on-lens” configuration, but without the yield issues of that configuration (which, from the rumors I’ve heard, are significant).

3. The sensor can be driven by popular p-cap controller ICs with TouchTurns custom firmware and sensor patterns. The resulting module specs appear to be in the ballpark of the Microsoft 8 Touch Logo (10 touches, <1 mm accuracy error, 12 mm minimum between fingers, ~100 Hz scan rate, etc.) – although meeting the Logo spec is typically unimportant in commercial applications.

4. TouchTurns has a complete prototype line in Santa Clara for quick-turn development builds, and an offshore partner (CN Innovations in Shenzhen) for low-cost mass production. The prototype line is capable of building a wide range of sensor architectures, as well as printing custom artwork on custom-shaped cover-glass.

These four aspects make TouchTurns highly competitive in a market that I believe will welcome it with open arms. You can find TouchTurns in the Corning booth (123), to the right of the big roll of Willow glass.-- Geoff Walker, Walker Mobile, LLC.

The I-Zone Rocks!

This year, SID DisplayWeek has added a refreshing new feature to the Exhibit Hall: the I-Zone. This is a special section that gives “researchers space to demonstrate their prototypes or other hardware demo units for 2 days free of charge.” The section was made possible through the sponsorship of E-Ink.

With fewer than two dozen tables, the I-Zone is a hotbed of innovation and enthusiasm. From clothing with embedded fiber optics that light up segmented displays to lenses made of liquid crystals that can be programmed to change their focus, there are many technology demonstrations that are likely to make you look twice.

One of my favorites was a demonstration by Citizen Holdings. A device that looked sort of like a table-top basketball backboard had a jumble of hardware where the net should have been. This device turned out to be a robotic combination of camera and projector. When you held out your hand, the camera would find it and the projector would display a control icon on the palm of your hand. Press the icon, and it would control the computer. For example, if a movie was playing on the attached computer, you could make it pause or play by touching the icon in your hand. Instead of projecting onto your hand, it could also project onto the table. You could tap the table twice to “summon” the control icons. They would be projected close to where you tapped.

This could be the precursor to a rich new user interface for television. Instead of having to make broad gestures, speak repetitive commands, or deal with a complex remote, this system could let you control the television system through a series of context-sensitive control displays. And if two or more people are watching, you can easily tell who has the attention of the controller by seeing where the icons are projected.

This clever demonstration was just one of many fascinating projects on display at the I-Zone.--Alfred Poor, HDTV

Head-Tracking 3DTV

Another I-Zone innovation was demonstrated by PolarScreens. The system relies on a head-tracking system to drive a no-glasses 3D display that uses a regular 120 Hz LCD panel plus a patterned active shutter panel to steer the separate images to the viewer’s two eyes. According to the company, the system can deliver the full resolution to each eye.

The system is also designed to “fail” gracefully. If you turn your head sideways to the point where the stereoscopic effect cannot be maintained, the display automatically switches to 2D mode. The head-tracking system can see when your eyes are close enough to horizontal again, and it will turn the 3d mode back on automatically.

Information Display’s own Steve Atwood took the system for a test drive, as seen in the photograph below. A demonstration screen displayed what the system camera saw, and how it was able to identify the major features on Steve’s face, such as his eyes (in spite of his substantial beard).

The system is intended for a single viewer, and is aimed at high end applications where the user may be moving around but still needs to see a high-resolution 3D auto-stereoscopic image. This design could be well suited for people who edit 3D movie and video content, and have to move around or look back and forth at other screens while working.--Alfred Poor, HDTV

The Master of Touch

Jeff Han, the Founder and CTO of Perceptive Pixel, demonstrated once again in his presentation today at the Display Week Investors Conference that he is the Master of Touch. What I mean by that is that Jeff consistently has the clearest vision of how touch needs to evolve to allow professionals to accomplish real work using touch, and he articulates that vision with exceptional clarity. Perceptive Pixel isn’t a touch-screen company – although it does make and sell a high-end 27-inch touch monitor; it's a company dedicated to inventing solutions to user interface problems in the knowledge-worker world.

Presentations at the Investors Conference aren’t frequently reported in Display Week coverage, perhaps because the conference is somewhat specialized and takes place during the first day of exhibits. The conference, which is run by Cowen and Company, the leading growth investment-banking firm focused on the display and touch-screen supply chain, is an excellent venue for learning more about important private and smaller public firms in the sector. This is the 8th time the conference has taken place; there were presentations by nine public and eight private companies.

It’s particularly difficult to describe a Jeff Han presentation because (a) he always presents at lightning speed, (b) he usually makes heavy use of simultaneous video, text and spoken content, and (c) he never gives the audience a copy of his slides. Jeff started his presentation today by making the same point that I made in my Sunday Short Course and Monday Seminar on touch: projected capacitive (p-cap) has won the war. It’s over. A billion users now expect touch to work like p-cap. If another touch technology provides a different user experience, the user is likely to be uncomfortable with it or simply reject it. Jeff believes that the touch industry therefore needs to focus on figuring out how to use p-cap to solve user interface problems beyond simply zooming an image on a smartphone or tablet.

With this goal in mind, Perceptive Pixel has figured out how to scale p-cap to unlimited sizes with no visible electrodes (unlike current large-format p-cap implementations that use visible 10-micron-wire electrodes). Jeff said that even 200 inches is no problem; if there is a display that large, Perceptive Pixel can make a p-cap touchscreen for it. The largest the company has actually demonstrated so far is 82 inches (at CES 2012) because that was the largest display it could easily buy. (This product also just won a 2012 Silver Display Industry Award from SID for Display Application of the Year.) The key elements of Perceptive Pixel's solution are (a) a custom, extremely high-performance p-cap controller re-imagined from the ground up, and (b) a method of applying invisible non-ITO p-cap electrodes on glass. Jeff showed a variety of demo videos of commercial touch applications on screen sizes ranging from a 27-inch reclining desktop monitor to a 20-foot wall of tiled touch-displays. The applications included broadcast-screen manipulation, 3D CAD, manipulation of multi-dimensional oil-well-exploration data sets, and many, many more. The impression this barrage of sophisticated touch applications makes is far beyond anything else I’ve ever seen from any other company in the touch industry. It’s so intense that it’s very difficult to describe.

Jeff ended his presentation with a video demo showing why simultaneous touch and stylus is highly desirable. (His implementation of p-cap, by the way, is capable of this at any size.) The demo showed an artist making changes in a sketch using a stylus in his right hand. The artist’s left hand was sometimes resting on the screen doing nothing (yet not interfering in any way) and sometimes adjusting the perspective of the drawing or making other control-type changes. The transition of the artist’s left hand between resting and active was almost imperceptible – unless the hand was making a specific gesture or touching a control spot, the application ignored it. This is what “ignoring unintended touches” is really all about; this is why Perceptive Pixel’s p-cap controller supports “an infinite number of touches”.

What I saw was both electrifying and frustrating. It was electrifying because the clarity and articulation of Jeff’s vision (and Perceptive Pixel’s execution) of what touch should be is so great that it literally leaves your mouth hanging open. It was frustrating because the only time Jeff’s vision is exposed is at two or three conferences a year. Since he never provides a copy of his slides at those conferences, there’s nothing to remind you later of what you experienced and of his thoughtful insights into the touch industry. I hope we'll hear more in future from the Master of Touch. -—by Geoff Walker, Walker Mobile, LLC

P-CAP LCD Integration and Alternate Transparent Conductors

Two great seminars today were given by Bob Mackey of Synaptics and Geoff Walker of Walker Mobile. While we all know projected-capacitive touch technology, commonly called "P-CAP" is taking off in handheld and mobile applications, I don't think I realized just how complex the options were for implementation and integration with LCD and OLED panels. A great deal of investment has been made to explore ways of integrating the technology directly into the LCD cell and combining it with the LCD manufacturing process. Some say this is the future; some, like Geoff, think this is a long shot because of all the existing business infrastructure around LCD module integrators, an estimated $8 billion or so. These are the companies that combine the LCDs and the P-CAP touch panels into modules for the device manufacturers. I guess we'll see how it all turns out.

I also learned that there has been some real innovation and progress in the area of alternative transparent conductors - essentially options for ITO replacement. Silver nanowires, carbon nanotubes, blackened copper mesh, and various other technologies are not yet ready for wholesale deployment but they are gaining traction. ID magazine recently covered the development by Cambrios of wet-processed silver nanowires and since then Cambrios has seen the launch of the "Cricket" smart phone by Samsung, which used its silver nanowire material for the touchscreen, along with Synaptics electronics. Still, as Bob Mackey pointed out, the perceived shortage of Indium is not nearly as bad as people have been saying, and the economic motivation for these alternative materials may not be as severe as we think. – Steve Atwood, Executive Editor, ID magazine

Display History Is on Exhibit at the Show

If you have not had a chance to see it yet, the exhibit of 50th Anniversary Display Archives is now up and running in the main lobby at Display Week, just to the left of the registration desk. Our centerpiece is a Toshiba 32-in. TFT-LCD TV, which represents the first introduction of overdrive technology, called the “low image-lag driving method,” to improve gray level and motion-picture response time. It achieved a factor of four or greater improvement compared to conventional methods, reducing the gray-to-gray pixel-response time to less than 16.7 milliseconds. Toshiba’s achievement was recognized by the Society for Information Display in 2004 with a Special Recognition award and by the Japan Institute of Invention and Innovation with its Imperial Invention Prize in 2009.

We also have an original Candescent Field-Emission Display (FED) based on cold-cathode field emission developed at SRI International and further improved by Candescent in the mid-1990s. This 13-in. diagonal sample was built on a 320 x 340 mm substrate development line in San Jose, CA. FED technology was one of my favorite alternatives to CRT at that time and I still remember all the efforts put forth to try to make it work commercially.

The other items in the collection include early active-matrix LCDs, numeric displays with a variety of technologies, and a Sony CRT Watchman, the first truly handheld portable TV product from the early '80s. – Steve Atwood, Executive Editor, ID magazine

Get the Display Week 2012 Mobile App

At Display Week? Headed to Display Week?

Get the most out of the Society for Information Display’s International Symposium, Seminar & Exhibition with the Display Week 2012 mobile app, featuring:

-Floor maps of the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center (BCEC), including details on venue services.

-Local transportation details—including flight, local transit, traffic alerts, convention center directions, and parking.

-Detailed GPS-enabled Google Maps of the local area with restaurants, hotels, and other local businesses and points of interest.

-Event Twitter feed

Download it at: http://swiftmobile.com/apps/sid2012

Corning and LG to Show New Products at Display Week

The Display Week exhibit starts tomorrow (Tuesday June 5) with a special ribbon cutting ceremony at 10:30 am in front of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Don't miss it!

Several companies are issuing announcements prior to the show, and a couple of the more intriguing ones come from LG and Corning. LG will be showing its 55-in. OLED TV, which will be hard to miss on the show floor, due to its size and the number of people crowding around it. LG will also be showing, for the first time, a 5-in. Full HD LCD panel. The panel, with a 16:9 aspect ratio, is based on AH-IPS (Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching) technology and features 440ppi and 1920x1080 resolution.

Also on display will be Corning's new Willow Glass, an ultra-slim flexible glass produced using the company’s proprietary fusion process to make glass that is 100 microns thick – about the thickness of a sheet of copy paper – and can be "wrapped" around a device or a structure.

Display Week 2012 is underway! The skies of Boston are gray, so it's an excellent day to stay inside and learn something.

Today' 4-hour "short courses" cover fundamentals in OLED lighting technology, flexible displays, touch technology and applications, and active-matrix devices and applications. These short courses, presented by world-reknowned experts in their fields, are a great way to build or strengthen your understanding of a particular area of display technology.

Tomorrow's lineup includes 20 applications and technology seminars on topics ranging from 3D Computer Vision to Micro-second Response Time in Blue-Phase LCDs, as well as the Business Conference and the Investors Conference. Topics to be covered in both conferences are very timely, and I'm particularly intrigued by "Do OLEDs and TFT-Oxides Change the Display Market Outlook?," which is being presented at 11:15 in tomorrow's Business Conference.

In case you hadn't already heard, The International Committee for Display Metrology (ICDM) and the Society for Information Display (SID) have announced the release of the Information Display Measurements Standard (IDMS. The IDMS is a much-needed document that will provide standard measurement procedures to quantify electronic display characteristics and qualities. It has been a long time in the making and it's exciting that it's going to be available at Display Week this year. A very limited number of copies will be available for sale at the SID book store at the show (so get there soon!), but the standard will also be available as a free download from the ICDM home site at www.icdm-sid.org as well as the SID website at www.sid.org. --Jenny Donelan, Managing Editor, ID magazine

Welcome to the 2012 Information Display news site dedicated to Display Week 2012 in Boston. Check here soon for updates from the show.