“To show off their work, the University of Michigan researchers created their school’s logo on a display only 9 microns tall (a strand of human hair is about 100 microns wide, so the display itself could fit inside the period at the end of this sentence),” Schramm reports.
“Crazy. You have to wonder what an iPhone-sized display would look like with a resolution like that (or if we’d even tell the difference, given that our eyes have a limit on the amount of detail they can discern),” Schramm reports.
Read more in the full article, with links and photo of that tiny Michigan logo, here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]
If iPhone 4 is already so fine you can’t see the pixels — that’s the whole point — why go even higher res?
Pretty cool, but if you can’t see the pixels in Apple’s retina display then why make them smaller?
At some point the law of diminishing returns comes into play and usually it the limits of human interaction that dictate those boundaries.
A Michigan logo in the period of every sentence. If’s that’s not an evil scheme then I don’t know what is.
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WE ARE… PENN STATE!
Spec wars have been going for a long time. Some company will get so they can state their screen is sharper than the retina display. M$ or droid geeks would cream their jeans for this.
This would give new meaning to the phrase, “reading between the lines.”
Wonderful, the march of technology. Maybe I con look forward to seeing consumer versions of this technology in the next 8-10 years. For now, though, I’d be happy with an iPad with Retinal Display.
There are some women that are considered to have a perfect body because of they measurements, even that, men clearly prefer other type of woman because they are pretty, sexier, or charismatic.
It is the same case for the specs of a product. Specs isn’t everything, the product must appeal to you, no convince you (sorry girls, you are not a product, but couldn’t find a better example).
Think of the computing power and amount of memory a display with that resolution and the size of, well, anything useful, would take to drive it. I’m still wow’ing over NeXT’s MegaPixel Display.
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With light emitting version of this at this scale…
I see…eyeMac the mac that resides on your eye. Surgically implanted behind your retina (retina display max) it flips down to turn on and display what you want to look at on the mac micro pro mounted on your eyebrow ridge.
Mac OS 7of9.
The point is, you could make an extremely small display that could be read with a magnifying lens in front of it. This would allow you to mount the equivalent of a large display in eyeglasses, for instance, or in a tiny iMac nano. At the moment the scale needed for any kind of input makes such small displays irrelevant, but we aren’t too many years away from high quality speech input. Even today, MacDictate works surprisingly well. So, this is not just a technical exercise.
Think LCD projectors with no screen-door, blocky pixels, even at 15 plus feet.
Think heads-up display googles with iPhone Retina Display quality views.
Think bigger than hand-helds and laptops. This is, as Basil says, much more than a technical exercise.
There is NO point in making pixels this small. There IS point in making bigger screens of Retina Display pixel density (imagine 3072 * 2304 pixel iPad display in couple of years)
Still catching up to print…
…if you print line art on paper, the recommended resolution for many years has been at least 600dpi, preferably 1200.
High-end color coffee table books are printed at 2400 dpi
You know where this is going.
No one will be able to read the fine print!
Wearable display glasses and mini projectors. Need I say more.
I know who could use this new tech. Lawyers! Makes reading the fine print that much more important. They can hid disclosure statements in periods now.
This would be a boon to cryptographers.
Which dot or period has my message?
You can make a dot you can send a message remember microdots.
So one day I will be able to edit my images natively … sweet
MDN Magic Wrod … Coming
@dan,
Print artwork is printed at recommended 600-2400 dpi in order to make smooth precise edges on halftone dots. But in that case the halftone lines per inch is a better (though still imperfect) analog to display pixel resolution, and it’s usually in the range of 65-185 lpi.
@ Posterboy:
Nice, but can you imagine the outcry of people who would have to pay ATT $350 to get out of their eyeMac contract when the eyeMac 2 with integrated laser came out the next year? Pandemonium would ensue, I tell ya!
Plus, who the hell wants a surgical implant at your local ATT store? And no, Verizon’s surgical team wouldn’t be any better, they would just demand to tatoo “Verizon Wireless” across your forehead at the same time.
Kinda like a dog whistle for human eyes. …
@poster boy & @biz law
Futurama has already cornered the market on the eyePhone. Matt Groening might already have the patent on that … lol.
…. ……… … !!.
LG will unveil the LEX8 Nano tech-powered 3D TV at IFA 2010. The display adopts the NANO Lighting Technology, which produces LG’s brightest, clearest and smoothest picture yet. The new LG LEX8 also features an improved localized dimming in both 2D and 3D (Apple & LG working together)
Said that YESTURDAY! May be related.
Next step. Special surgical procedure (or genetic engineering) to improve human eyesight. Better yet, direct machine-brain interface, so that you don’t need any stinkin’ display.
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RETRACTION: LG nano whatever…cool
LG nano “lighting” NOT COOL. As I now understand it….
“An extremely thin film printed with minuscule dots positioned in front of a full array of LEDs disperses light more evenly and effectively across the screen-” — so what????
I thught this REPLACED LCDS, BACKLIGHTING, etc. I thought after SONY stopped FED TV, and Canon SED TV (both BETTER THAN LCD), this was a REAL innovation. But it’s NOT! I quess this might replace the color filter…big deal!
I want total led-tv. That’s led, not oled. Led sub pixel lighting.
Two ways to do it:
1. Individual RGB sub pixel leds. NO LCDS. NO COLOR FILTER (hard to do)
2. Sub pixel leds (WHITE), with color filter. (easier to do)
ALL light SHOULD COME FROM THE LEDS. NO LCD! NO POLERIZERS! SHEESHH! If I can’t get FED or SED TV, can I at least get sub pixel led displays?
Visual Acuity for the average person is *about* 275 microradians. This equates to *about* 300 ppi at about a foot distance. People with significanly better than average acuity can see up to a factor of two beyond this — so *about* 600 ppi. I actually worked with a person a few years back who had so called “20/10” eyesight. What he could see was scary.
This “about 300 ppi” is for standard vision evaluations. This does not take into account such things as edge effects.
If you’ve ever see images from NOAA’s GOES satellites of the New Oleans areas you can see the bridge across Lake Pontchartrain in those images. The interesting thing is the pixel resolution on the GOES satellite is 1 km. Clearly that bridge is NOT 1 km wide.
The same goes for human vision. People can “see” much finer resolution than the gross “visual acuity” number. A commonly accepted value for this is approximately 35 microradians. This equates to roughly 2390 ppi at 12″. This does not take into account those people with exceptional vision.
Therefore to be beyond what the vast majority of people can see in any fashion the screen resolution at 12″ needs to be about 2400 ppi or better. Anything less than this is not really a “waste”. Anything significantly more than this can be considered a waste.
For those who are comparing this to print… The high end printers typically use 2540 dpi in their prints (the high end Linos and such). This value is certainly beyond what the vast majority of people can see without the aid of some magnifying device.
S. O. M.!
After a recent visit to the Spy Museum in DC, I am interested to know what MDN readers think the possible uses for this would be in spying?