The Apple Watch is a tiny square that's on your wrist. This could take up your entire arm. The Apple Watch may have a better resolution, but more space is the killer feature here. You can actually do stuff on this, unlike a microscopic little watch.
That's great. Then show some examples of that. My point was that the examples in the linked video were meh at best. The map's resolution was useless in functionality. The texting example was also weird, in that I don't want every other person in the room to see my texts. Things can be fun, but bad examples just don't do it justice.
Think of those as proof of concept. Imaginative types will come up with all sorts of interesting use cases. It is a pixel display on fabric, do whatever you want with it... pulse it to music, send notifications, just animate living textures...
I think the point here isn't whether this is ready for commercialization and practical consumer use immediately. The point is they made something that works and is easily comprehensible as to the kinds of things it makes possible. That's really impressive!
But club costumes are probably a pretty high margin market and with a lot of DIY people making costumes out of the latest neatest thing.
I don't know why you wouldn't be able to play recordings of electricsheep or something though, or just use a microphone to do effects based on audio. I'd imagine this gets adopted in costumes way before it's in something broadly used.
From the videos I've seen of this kind of EL wiring, you're doing a diservice to electricsheep if you're saying this kind of thing can generate the graphics quality of sheep. It is funny(coincidentally) as I have the AppleTV 4k ElectriSheep running on my TV while reading HN and listening to choons. The stuff in this article can't hold a candle to it.
EL stuff has been around for awhile. The one thing this particular post makes impressive is the sheer size of it working. As soon as Lady Ada brings out these kind of rolls, then we might see some cool monochrome environmental input animations. What I'd love to see is a durable fabric with individualy addressable LEDs woven within that is as durable and washable. Then, maybe we can see some sheeps on clothing.
Very cool. The basic principle is that a conductive wire is coated in EL material. Those wires run one direction in the weave of the matrix -- lets call them columns. And then the other direction is another wire that is relatively flat that contacts against the EL material and lays nicely flat against the EL coated wire. The second set of wires lets call those rows. Since the rows are fairly transparent, when you apply a voltage between the column and row you form a voltage across the EL material and it lights up in that particular row / column intersection. That's how you address each pixel. The transparent electrodes are polyurethane ionic gel fibers that use a ionic material called EMIM-TFSI apparently.
This is interesting, but durability and cost will be a huge factor in investment or adoltion. Reading about the illumination control electronics also sounds like describing it as a "display" in the common usage is not accurate. Without a lot of new electronics it's just an illuminated pattern controlled by the loom.
That's still potentially valuable, but you won't see arbitrary moving images any time soon. It might be possible to use many of the passive matrix methods to allow changes at low resolutions, like segmented displays.
> Moreover, the intensity of the majority of the EL units varied by <15% even after repeated folding along different directions (Extended Data Fig. 3a–h), and the intensity of the EL units at the folding line remained stable over 10,000 cycles of folding in each folding direction (Extended Data Fig. 3i–l), indicating superior durability over traditional film displays.
I wouldn't be surprised if the early versions have durability problems, but this technology seems like it's got a lot of opportunity for optimizing that, and already seems durable enough for club wear (as opposed to, say, work clothes).
It definitely still looks like a segmented display, with large pixel units each comprised of a few strands.
It's likely using weaved vertical and horizontal fibers, with it scanning through each horizontal fiber, triggering the vertical lines in tandem to illuminate a pixel at crossing points in the row.
el-wire has two electrodes, one in the core and one usually spiraling around the outside, I think in this case the spiraling one is shared with one electrode and the EL glowy stuff as weft and the other electrode as warp - when you light them both up a bit of EL stuff glows
Now usually it take a 100v AC signal to drive EL-wire and it will give you a nasty shock if you're not careful I'd be a bit leary about using this fabric (plus because it's multiplexed I'd guess they're probably driving it with more than 100v to get any brightness)
Yeah... I've worked with some smart fabrics and I wouldn't touch them knowing the voltages this kind of stuff requires to work.
I'm sure it can be done safely, but those folks touching it were all wearing gloves. I agree!
And if a single wire in the fiber breaks the entire line is gone, though this is hardly perfect with stationary stuff it seems a lot easier to happen in a fabric...
But still extremely cool. I just hesitate to wear clothes that I have to plug into a wall outlet :-D
Remember how one if the main characters of the "Three body problem" woke up from hibernation in the future, and every surface was a display? That's cool tech and all, but do we need more displays?
Depends on how they're used. I can think of 20 ideas right now for where I'd find ubiquitous displays useful - from walls changing colors (in lieu of repainting) or even displaying images (with head tracking it becomes a single-player holodeck), through infinite whiteboards, being able to read or work on digital stuff in arbitrary locations, to subtle status displays on blended items...
Hell, I'd love to have the wall above the wardrobe display a few lines of text from a book, so I can read it while cleaning the living room, with my little kid not being able to see it (due to differences of eye level) and thus not becoming distracted from independent play (or helping in cleaning) by an active computer screen.
And that's just personal use; there's even more potential application in shared spaces, in industrial use, in healthcare, ...
But if these screens are to be controlled by corporations, sneak ads everywhere and otherwise not interoperate with each other, and with every device there is? Then I don't want that to exist.
The real game changer will be self-assembling displays sprayed on a surface. Imagine a spray can where you could put a display anywhere with wireless connectivity.
I wonder what will come sooner. Displays everywhere, or ubiquitous AR where you can share screens with nearby people. The second one could be nicer in theory as it is opt in and wouldn’t cause light pollution.
