In the Innovations zone was a company, Sun Innovations, that has been developing a novel transparent display technology which we previously saw at SID in 2015 (SID 2015 Round-Up). The system exploits materials that are ‘QD-like’ and emit red and green. These are embedded in a glass or film panel and are then illuminated by projected blue light to create red, blue and green pixels. There is no alignment, so it tooks us a minute or two to realise that the colour selection is in the frequency domain. The projection system produces three different blue frequencies and the materials are sensitive enough to react only only the correct one. The projector is based on aDLP and has 1280 x 800 resolution.
Transparency of the glass is over 80% and could even get to 90%, depending on features such as the use of anti-reflective films and other layers in the optical stack.
The image looked surprisingly good and one reason is the lack of haze which is claimed to be less than 2%. One of the potential applications is in automotive windshields. Another is the use of the material on the front of LCD screens so that laser pointers work correctly (normally the beam from a laser pointer is not visible on an LCD).
Sun Innovations can put their material on any glass surface. Image:Meko
