Modern Workspace: Displays
10 December 2020 | Written by Gary Cooper and Philip Stoddart
The modern display has changed enormously over the last ten years. Size, dimensions, weight, DPI, colour gamut, lighting, touch, bezels and power efficiency have all improved with displays becoming increasingly more affordable.
Once unimaginable, two 98” displays side by side in a customer’s boardroom.
The larger the display, the more canvas is available to show all manner of applications and information together.
Display revolution
Size matters. Our home TV’s, have driven expectations around what a display should look like, perform like and how big it should be. But as corporate meeting rooms moved beyond flip charts, whiteboards and acetate projectors it became obvious that having a display hooked up to a computer could bring new levels of immersion and convey information in new ways. A laptop connected to a large display in a meeting room would turn us all into presentation gods.
OK, so the promise of PowerPoint wasn’t fully realised and we didn’t all put Steve Jobs out of work. But those first use cases of CRTs in meeting rooms on a cart playing a training video have come a long way. Now we can access data and applications in real time and present to huge flat panel touchscreens wirelessly from our iPads. As displays got larger, thinner, lighter and more affordable we found that having a large display in a meeting room was less of a luxury and more of a necessity.
Displays have evolved driven by the TV market
10 years ago we talked of ‘Plasma TVs’. Flat panel, post CRT displays. LED based LCD displays were just becoming the norm. Display sizes ranged from 32” to 60” with 1080p resolution, the latter costing in the region of $7000. Nowadays (circa 2020) you can purchase a 75” 8K display for around the same kind of price tag.
So what might the future of display technology look like?
Samsung have championed the new Micro-LED format, which provides an even greater level of density of pixels with a display that is less obstructed by layers of membranes or glass. Their showcase of “The Wall’ at various events demonstrated the quality and vibrancy of this new technology. TV’s sporting Micro-LED were shown at CES in 2020. The likelihood is that this will help form a new display market alongside OLED for a while.
But simply having better resolution and more brightness, higher refresh rates and thinner, thinner, thinner will only go so far. Where are real innovations that aren’t just an evolution of existing technology?
Apple patented a ‘camera inside the display’ back in 2007
Want to make true eye contact with the person you’re talking to via a video call? Apple had the idea to make the display in their products also be a camera back in this patent filing from 2007. This works on the principle of a camera sensor ‘seeing’ through transparent areas of the display itself. More than one sensor could be used to 'stitch’ the overall image the cameras see through software. This followed a slightly earlier patent filing from 2004 where the pixels of the display would be interspersed with tiny sensors which would capture incoming light and create the image that the display could see. When we can expect to see such technology is anyone’s guess. But this would be another huge leap forward from the punch-hole cameras we currently see on today’s phones.
What can be achieved through hardware can sometimes to achieved through software too. Microsoft introduced a feature called ‘Eye Contact’ for the Surface Pro X, which uses AI to simulate eye contact by adjusting the gaze of the person, effectively redrawing their eyes so that they’re continually looking directly at the person they’re engaging with via video call. This means you can look at the display, but the person you’re talking to sees you looking at ‘them’ rather than the slight offset you experience because they’re not looking directly at the camera lens.
Under-screen camera technology has arrived on smart phones with the ZTE Axon 20 5G being one of the first commercially available models to have this capability.
Folding displays or system of connecting devices?
As displays have become more capable and we interact with them through touch, the role that they play in the way we interact with technology has changed too. Displays are now replacing mice and keyboards as they can present adaptive software to allow more than simple typing or a pointing device. Recently we’ve seen displays which allow a single display to fold in half to become smaller and easier to transport. Another method is to have a second display join with a primary display to enlarge the overall canvas. Both of these approaches are championed depending on the manufacturer. As we saw in the Microsoft video from the first Modern Workspace Insight, small displays that function independently but can also join together to create an overall larger display are both visionary concepts. Microsoft have designed the Surface Duo to be their two display folding device, whereas Apple have multiple patents currently one of which filed in 2017 (above) shows an interconnecting device. Think of it as two iPads that can be joined together to make a larger giant iPad. The greatest challenge in all of this is how to create the right software to transform tablet to laptop and vice versa. Both Apple and Microsoft are iterating versions of their operating systems trying to find the perfect balance.
Smart boards bring a whole new level of interactivity
Look back over the last ten years and displays with touch or pen interactivity have come a long way. From resistive, stylus input displays to super low latency capacitive, paper simulating smart pens with multi-touch. Smart phones have set our expectations for how to interact with almost all kinds of displays today. The Samsung Flip and Microsoft Surface Hub are prime examples of how the smartphone and tablet experience can scale up to larger displays. Simultaneous multi-user interactivity though presents these devices with additional challenges though that typically are not present on a personal device such a phone. The hardware and software challenges present for these devices mean that they’re significantly more complex to design than simply a ‘large tablet’ or ‘digital flip chart’. In Samsung Flip video great care has been paid to the interaction between pen and display, but businesses will want to know who made that annotation and can I track those changes?
Small scale interactive projection
Projectors are dead, long live projectors
Projection technology was once the only way that you could get a very large image canvas. Today, projection technology still excels in cinema but we’re seeing less of it used in corporates. However, projection is seeing a new lease of life through interactive projection. The Puppy Haichi Infinite M1 is one such device that allows an ordinary table top to become a touchscreen display. As this technology improves and the projection distance improves it is possible to envision a future where multiple small projectors could be positioned in the ceiling to provide interactive displays on any local surface.
So will display technology evolve around us akin to a Holodeck? Or will Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality using a wearable of some sort be the more pervasive path? Many have said that we’ve all ready reached a DPI density greater than what the human eye can distinguish from a ‘real’ image. Nevertheless, we’re pretty sure that industry marketeers will laud their new 15360 × 8640 pixel (16K), 219” display. You just need a wall big enough to fit it on!