From Ars Technica:

Roll up displays in 2005?

Posted 10/27/2002 - 11:20PM, by Caesar
Cambridge Display Technology group has acquired its rival Opsys, fusing the two companies together in the hopes that flexible, rollable TV and computing displays might see the light of day by 2005. As we've reported before, Organic LEDs will be the Next Big Thing™ in flat panel displays, and Kodak, IBM, and CDT are racing furiously to get a grasp on the emerging market. CDT owns a patent relating to one of the major OLED production technologies, but this acquisition moves the target date up, so it seems. Even almost two months ago their CEO was touting the likelihood of this technology being available in 2007, but hey, let's lop two years off of that estimate.

Opsys, spun out of Oxford and St Andrews Universities in 1997, uses new polymers, called dendrimers, which are brighter and more energy efficient than CDT's light-emitting polymers (LEPs). The two companies hope to blend their technologies to improve the lifetime of the dendrimers.

While the energy efficiency and wide viewing-angles of OLED technology is exciting to me, what really gets me going is the idea of a roll-up display. Since an OLED-based displayed needs no backlight and can be printed on flexible plastic, it's a real possibility. What can I say, Semi and I want our Globals! Imagine a visual communicator with a retractable screen that fits inside something the size of chapstick. Or how about a pull-out display built into your dashboard that can display anything from maps, to TV, to websites?

I seem to recall that on Earth: Final Conflict, they had these phones that had built in screens that popped out so that they could see the caller. We already ahve phones now with built in two way video, so the larger roll out screeen is the next step in this tech. I would like to see maps that get updated via bluetooth, and/or are synched to a GPS unit, allowing for a constant update of the users postion. Imagine if you bought a subcription ($10/year) to a map service that automatically updated your atlas, with options for countries, history, and higways.

Further uses: Flooring tiles: change the pattern of your flooring whenever you want, as the tiles are all networked together allowing you to have ever shifting patterns, video feeds, maps, or visualizations that are synched to music all on your floor. For that matter, your ceiling as well. Heck, any flat surface that they can be mounted to could be used.

Buy one game board and have it include all kinds of games, chess, checkers, backgammon, monopoly, parcheesi, trivial pursuit, all from one master board, and all you buy is the data of the game and any pieces that you might need.

Instead of buying the newspaper every day, have it fed via RSS to your livepaper via bluetooth either at home from your computer, via your cell, or at a newsstand when you walk by (since you've subscribed, right?) via 802.11 You could get all your magazines in this manner, simply subscribing online, and everytime you are in range of a stand, the paper automatically checks to see if there is anything new that you are due to get. Leace the paper in a cradle overnight to recharge and goather feeds while you sleep eat, etc, and that way it's always up to date.

Given enough RAM, the paper could serve video as well, so the shows that you missed last night that you recorded on your PVR are now watchable in a comfortably sized format while you commute into the city.  If you have a fat enough pipe while mobile, you could get live feeds from news channels as well, and watch what is happening in real time as you go.

7:17:45 AM    

Thought while driving home today: hook your Apple Rendezvous server up to your Tivo/Replay device for archiving and share the shows you love with your friends. Thought spawned from Dave and Adam. Have the file server set to put pout an RSS 2.0 feed of what it has just finished taping, so that subscribed folks can decide if they want to D/L it while they sleep for viewing later. No more issues of missing recording one show because another is on (and being recorded) at the same time, and since you have to d/l the whole show, you get all the commercials as well. Now you are effectively paying the freight of the show via both bandwidth and storage space.

Who wants to set this up to see if it'll work? 

UPDATE: Add in this and you've really got something going on.

7:33:12 PM    

Very cool. While AI bots for chat have been around for a while, this onw puts a flash based face on the bot, and has a decent form of voice synthesis going on. If the tech is compact enough, run it on your Pocket PC or Clie. Now you've got a wireless stream for data that you can hit for answers, as well as get information from all in real time, and by listening.

I imagine you could have different vocies/faces for differing situations, so that you can then have emergency alerts sound different from an email notification.    

Bot Mots.

Lori found some interesting chat mates:

"Meet Julia, the bot, at http://www.verbots.com. She is an interactive virtual personality and she can answer what the meaning of life is, why the sky is blue, and if she does not know the answer, she brings up the term in a google search which appears on the screen. I brought Julia up this evening and had both children (Katie, 9 and Patrick 6) at my shoulder wanting to ask her questions.  Verbot came out with a public library bot at the Computers in Libraries conference, but the link which was sent to me does not work. http://www.talkie.com is very interesting too. My kids really liked Barkie, the 'talkie' at www.pets911.com, a talking puppy."

Unfortunately, the kids were already asleep when I got home tonight or I would have gotten their reactions, too.

[The Shifted Librarian]

This would also make an excellent replacement for/supplement to a chatbot/AIMbot on a site, providing a more human tone to the information that it has to give.

8:25:58 AM