April 9, 2008 -- A new nanowire-based screen could create Minority Report-style newspapers or show you the menu of your favorite restaurant as you walk down the street.
"It could be used to project GPS navigation information on a car windshield. It would be like driving in a video game," said David Janes, a scientist at Purdue University and a study author.
Such "heads-up" displays are commonly found in fighter jets, where information about other aircraft overlays them in the pilot's field of view.
Current heads-up displays are usually projected from below the dashboard, reflecting off specially mirrored glass into the eyes of the beholder.
The new display, which uses organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) embedded in transparent nanowires, would be placed directly on a car windshield, or even on eyeglasses, to overlay information on real objects, such as off-ramps.
Coupled with a computer, the same material used in eyeglasses would allow a user to look at a restaurant while walking down the street and view its menu without stopping in.
Since the display is transparent and flexible, it could also be used to create e-paper or e-books capable of being continually updated with videos and images.
"Imagine seeing full-motion video on your USA Today," said Janes.
The researchers stress that the current device, which measures 2mm by 2mm, is proof of concept.
"This is our Kitty-Hawk," said Tobin Marks, a researcher from Northwestern University and another study author, referring to the first flight of a motorized airplane.
Entire rows or columns in the display can produce green light as bright as in most commercial TVs, but the scientists can not yet illuminate individual pixels.
Still, the team has been approached by car manufacturers and plans to license the technology to a small start-up company. They hope to have a large-scale prototype within five years.
The adoption of transparent nanowire OLED displays will mirror that of liquid crystal displays, appearing first in watches and cell phone displays and growing into larger, television-sized displays, say the scientists.
"If you asked me about this a year ago, I would have said this was way far out in the future," said John Rogers, a scientist at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not involved with the paper. "But there is a lot of work that makes OLED technology very promising."
The research appears in the April issue of Nano Letters.
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