Windows are kind of a drag for airplanes—literally. They add extra weight, weaken the body, and generally slow the aircraft down. That’s why the new Spike S-512 Supersonic Jet won’t have any. Instead, passengers get to enjoy their sky-high surroundings on real-time, panoramic video screens.
Sure, you think about how big a phone’s screen is all the time, but how much of a phone’s screen is actually screen? This handy visualization from Post PC shows exactly how your handset stacks up against the rest of the world in screen-to-bezel ratio. The results might surprise you.
Starting in 2010 when Apple made the retina display and display quality a central theme for their product marketing, displays have moved up from the doldrums into an unprecedented renaissance of new display technologies for smartphones, tablets, TVs, and entirely new classes of products like wearable displays.
Smashed your iPhone 5C screen recently? Looks like your days of picking shards of glass from your palms are numbered. Starting next week, Apple will finally start offering in-store screen repairs/replacements for 5C users at any Apple Store
In the future we should hope for all of our displays to be OLED; it’s thin, light, deep with color, and energy efficient to boot. It’s also incredibly expensive. That could soon change, though, thanks to a jumped-up inkjet printer.
The display on your phone is relatively tiny. But in pixels, it’s friggin’ huge. That’s the beauty of high resolution. So how would that phone screen compare to your TV, or your tablet or your laptop if it was spread out to a similarly-sized screen? Doghouse Diaries made this graphic to show you, and it’s kind of nuts.
Zoetropes are nearly as old as civilization—the first one was invented in 180 AD—but this is an entirely new spin (so to speak) on the same basic concept. This flatscreen monitor spins at such high speeds that our eyeballs are tricked into perceiving the two-dimensional animations playing on its surface as 360 degree figures.
The project was built by Lausanne University of Art and Design student Benjamin Muzzin, for his thesis project in media and UX design. It’s a fairly simple (and fairly dangerous?) setup. Two monitor are mounted back to back on a rod attached to a stabilizing frame—below it, a motor spins the rod and the screen itself kicks into gear. At high speeds, the 2D shapes seem 3D, no matter where you’re standing in relation to the screen—taking advantage of a phenomenon called "persistence of vision" in which our eyes fill in the gaps as an object moves at high speeds. Muzzin explains:
With this project I wanted to explore the notion of the third dimension, with the desire to try to get out of the usual frame of a flat screen. For this, my work mainly consisted in exploring and experimenting a different device for displaying images, trying to give animations volume in space. The resulting machine works with the rotation of two screens placed back to back, creating a three-dimensional animated sequence that can be seen at 360 degrees. Due to the persistence of vision, the shapes that appear on the screen turn into kinetic light sculptures.
It’s unclear if he has any plans to replicate the process in the future, though these days he heads up a company that makes motion graphics for live music called Dazzle Studio. Which is appropriate, since we’re thoroughly dazzled by this video. [CreativeApplications]
The Wall Street Journal is adding weight to rumors of growing iPhone screens sizes
Your phone is filthy. Anything that’s getting rubbed by your grimy little fingers on a ridiculously regular basis is going to be far from pristine. But Corning can help. Its newest revision of Gorilla Glass is not only ridiculously resilient, it also kills pesky germs all by itself.
According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, LG is planning to launch a flexible OLED smartphone before the end of 2013. More »