Sometimes the best really is saved for last, as the saying goes, and Session 80, the final session of Display Week, on Friday morning at SID helps illustrate the point. Those who stuck it out to the last day were rewarded with a series of presentations under the banner of Digital Signage, chaired by industry icon Adi Abileah of Planar Systems, who ushered in a series of presentations (interestingly) all from Sharp Corp. in Japan or Sharp Labs, in Camas, Washington.

Steve Sechrist
Senior Analyst and Editor

The presentations were as diverse as they were compelling. The first session on High resolution tiled display systems (Sachin Deshpande and Scott Daly) showed a 10K x 4.5K resolution tiled display made from twenty smaller (37-inch) panels (LC37GP1U) in a 5×4 array that reached 177-inch diagonal size–and driven by a computer cluster.

Deshpande based out of Sharp Labs of America, looked to address the issues of multiple simultaneous users (what he called "advanced user interaction") on the wall display, producing both new display and audio technologies. For example the group showed both a 4K (4096 x 2160) video streaming technology (uncompressed/compressed streaming and playback over LAN and WAN.) To support the audio, the group developed a "spatialized" audio solution using the human ability to localize sound sources and creating a solution where "…audio is perceived to come from actual on-display AV window location. Together, they help individual users improve simultaneous interaction, supporting a home or business video wall solution with multiple AV entertainment/information feeds."

As if this wasn’t enough, they also developed a new Tiled Display Application Toolkit (in collaboration with the University of Illinois) that allowed the development of tiled display widgets, for multi-user application development; a Remote Desktop Connectivity application not unlike RDP for single PC apps, and an Inter-tile Synchronization Design Tool that helps in display continuity, overcoming space-time sync mismatch. - We found the presentation impressive, with more than enough material for three SID papers. (Look for an extended story on this presentation in the upcoming Large Display Report that will publish on June 3rd.)

While Deshpande’s presentation on tiled displays kept building, adding one new technology after another, the crescendo of the session came in the Distinguished "Moth Eye" Paper from Sharp Japan’s Tokio Taguchi (et. al.) on Ultra Low Reflective 60-inch LCD with Uniform Moth-Eye Surface for Digital Signage (session 80.3.) This reported a new breakthrough AR material created for large displays in outdoor signage that reduces the reflectance to just 0.04% in the visible light range. It came from previous work, based on 1967 research that found the corneal surfaces of moths have a sub wavelength anti-reflective structure… that could be replicated to eliminate surface reflection.

Past work replicated this using laser beam interference methods creating a surface pitch smaller than the wavelength of visible light but the approach was too small and expensive to apply to large (60-inch) outdoor Digital Sign applications, where AR is needed most. Taguchi and company developed a nano-imprinting method to create large area, AR material that can be mass produced on TAC based film–and demonstrated its use on a 60-inch Sharp LCD panel.

The other two presentations from Sharp included a new see-through AM LCD without Polarizers used as a large display window for out of home applications, and a new intuitive and interactive approach for viewing high resolution (giga-pixel) images that tracks the viewer in proximity to the image creating a constantly updated "viewport" with both zoom and pan action.

Session 80 gave SID attendees a brief look not just at Digital Signage, but into the future of displays in general, and that future is big. Large format tiled displays can now be accessed by multiple users simultaneously with new technologies that look to human interaction to solve complex problems (like spatial audio solutions that take advantage of the human ability to localize sound.) Equally compelling is the use of nano technology to control light at the sub wavelength level, opening a new era in the way we manipulate and control photons to improve display quality and ultimately our own lives. What a Show!