Display

About this time last year, the Looking Glass Factory launched a 32-inch, 8K-resolution 3D lightfield display for retail, medical imaging and entertainment. Now the company has announced a personal holographic display called the Portrait.

Although foldable phones have only just made their way onto the smartphone scene, manufacturers are already exploring the next innovation: handsets with rollable displays. One of the first to break cover is the Oppo X 2021 concept phone.

Sci-fi has been promising holograms for decades, but they always feel out of reach. Now Samsung has made strides towards realistic holograms, with a prototype thin-panel device that can display 3D images in 4K resolution with a wide viewing angle.

Researchers at Stanford and Samsung have developed a proof-of-concept ultra-high-resolution OLED display. “Metaphotonic” tech could improve a screen's color purity and potentially boost the pixel density to an astounding 10,000 pixels per inch (ppi).

Sony has debuted a new kind of 3D monitor with its Spatial Reality Display, which tracks your eyes and shows a different dynamically-generated image for each eye to give you a small, single-viewer window into a three-dimensional world.

Sometimes, one touch display on a smartphone just doesn't seem enough. LG has recognized this and announced the Wing, where the main screen swivels on a hinge to reveal a half-size second one.

Earlier in the year, LG Display showed its vision for the aircraft cabin of the future, which included transparent OLED partitions. Now the company has installed the technology in subway train windows.

The Cinera Edge is a light personal cinema headset that packs a 5K(ish)-resolution display and Dolby Surround Sound. It uses two OLED displays measuring just 0.83 inches with 2560 x 1440 pixels each, creating the equivalent of almost an IMAX screen.

Through a combination of 3D printing techniques and sprayable electronic technology, researchers have come up with a new kind of touchscreen display that can be adapted to almost any shape. They're calling it ProtoSpray.

Technology could really use some more sustainable sources, and now researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have turned to an unusual one. The team has shown that human hair from barber shops can be used to create OLED displays.

For people who rely on Braille, reading displays and signs in public can be a challenge, but a new system could help. HaptiRead is a haptic feedback device that uses ultrasound pulses in precise patterns to reproduce Braille text in midair.

Although some tantalizing research is currently underway, we're still waiting to see stretchable electronic displays reach production. Well, scientists have now created one that can not only be stretched, but that also self-heals when damaged.