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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday March 27 2018, @10:42PM   Printer-friendly
from the see-through-is-not-invisible dept.

UC Berkeley engineers have built a bright-light emitting device that is millimeters wide and fully transparent when turned off. The light emitting material in this device is a monolayer semiconductor, which is just three atoms thick.

The device opens the door to invisible displays on walls and windows – displays that would be bright when turned on but see-through when turned off — or in futuristic applications such as light-emitting tattoos, according to the researchers.

“The materials are so thin and flexible that the device can be made transparent and can conform to curved surfaces,” said Der-Hsien Lien, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and a co-first author along with Matin Amani and Sujay Desai, both doctoral students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley.

Their study was published March 26 in the journal Nature Communications. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

[...] This device is a proof-of-concept, and much research still remains, primarily to improve efficiency. Measuring this device’s efficiency is not straightforward, but the researchers think it’s about 1 percent efficient. Commercial LEDs have efficiencies of around 25 to 30 percent.

The concept may be applicable to other devices and other kinds of materials, the device could one day have applications in a number of fields where having invisible displays are warranted. That could be an atomically thin display that’s imprinted on a wall or even on human skin.

“A lot of work remains to be done and a number of challenges need to be overcome to further advance the technology for practical applications,” Javey said. “However, this is one step forward by presenting a device architecture for easy injection of both charges into monolayer semiconductors.”


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  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:20AM (2 children)

    by tftp (806) on Wednesday March 28 2018, @03:20AM (#659322) Homepage
    More like "not in these bodies." Shoulders and arms are terribly imprecise, and the muscular support is not sufficient for doing these gestures for long. And they are terribly slow. For now we use our hands and fingers for fast, precise control. In the future we will have brain-machine interfaces.
  • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:29PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday March 28 2018, @01:29PM (#659489) Journal

    Shoulders and arms are terribly imprecise

    Hands are not. And handily, they are attached to arms and thence to shoulders, so I suspect there will be some kind of compromise that makes this all work to some useful extent. And of course both image content recognition and voice input are both now a thing, although they both still need work. It's easy to say "zoom in on the guy in the black hat", for instance. I talk to my hardware all the time, and mostly, it gets it right these days.

    Also, there are some instances where very large displays are best; for instance, if you have a map, and you need to indicate / locate / connect / etc. more than one location at a time, but you require adequate display resolution to accurately place the points while keeping the overall map unsegmented. Another instance where it would be useful is when giving a presentation. The easier it is to indicate and control what you're showing, the more information you can get across.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:20PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 28 2018, @02:20PM (#659517)

    Why would you want a shitty display if you have a proper brain interface?