The lens harvests energy from an external source using an antenna and has an integrated circuit to store the harvested power and transfer it to a transparent sapphire chip with a single blue LED. Unfortunately, while the range of the display was about one meter in free space, that range was reduced to about two centimeters when it was placed on the eye.

Another of the challenges facing the creation of a Terminator-style eye display is that the minimum focal distance of a human eye is only a few centimeters. This means that information displayed on a contact lens would appear blurry. To address this, the researchers used thin Fresnel lenses to magnify the display.

More research is needed before we’ll be able to read text on our eyeballs though. "We need to improve the antenna design and the associated matching network and optimize the transmission frequency to achieve an overall improvement in the range of wireless transmission," said Parviz, co-author of the study. "Our next goal, however, is to incorporate some predetermined text in the contact lens."

A new, truly 360-degree 3-D display has been developed by researchers at Osaka University. The fog display is created by three projectors each beaming a different image into a column of thin fog, making the resulting image appear 3-dimensional from all angles. This technique means that viewers can physically walk around the display to see it from different vantage points without losing the 3-D effect.

As we see in the video, the image quality is still a little shaky, but researchers say their next step is to make the technology “more stable.” Applications for the 360-Degree Observable Fog Display are not exactly clear, but researcher Asuka Yagi says in the video that they hope to apply it in “healthcare and entertainment.” The project was inspired by amusement park fog displays, so we can only hope that means one day your children will be taking pictures with 3-D fog princesses at theme parks.

Samsung Mobile Display is set to unveil a pair of next-gen AMOLED display prototypes at CES 2011

There’s bound to be all manner of display technologies vying for eyeballs at CES 2011 when it kicks off in Las Vegas next week and two prototype AMOLED displays from Samsung Mobile Display (SMD) will definitely be high on our list of things to check out. The first is a 4.5-inch 800 x 480 (WVGA) resolution flexible AMOLED display concept prototype for mobile devices, while the second is the world’s largest transparent AMOLED display prototype for use in PC monitors and TVs.

Flexible AMOLED display prototype

SMD’s 4.5-inch flexible AMOLED display is two millimeters (0.08-in) thick and can be rolled down to a radius of one centimeter (0.39-in). The concept prototype’s 800 x 480 resolution, which Samsung claims is four times that of the previous most flexible AMOLED prototype constructed, comes courtesy of a new plastic substrate that can withstand the 450-500 degree Celsius temperatures required in the manufacturing process.

As this overcomes the problem of previous plastic materials melting during the manufacturing process that made commercialization of such devices difficult, Samsung says the concept display on show marks a major step on the road to mass production for the next-gen display, which is aimed at smartphones and tablet PCs.

Transparent AMOLED display prototype

The second prototype display to be unveiled is aimed at larger screen applications such as TVs and PC monitors. The 19-inch transparent AMOLED display prototype sports a qFHD (quad Full High Definition) resolution. This is a non-standard resolution of 3840 x 2160 pixels arranged in a 16:9 aspect ratio that gets its name from being four times the resolution of 1080p.

The prototype display is the world’s first large transparent AMOLED display prototype and, while the average amount of transparency previously achieved has been below 10 percent, SMD’s display maintains up to 30 percent transparency whether it is turned on or off. Samsung says this will allow the technology to be used for surfing the internet while watching TV or even watching TV on windows – and by that it means the glass kind, including car windows, not the operating system.

As well as the 19-inch prototype, SMD will also be exhibiting a 14-inch qFHD transparent AMOLED display designed for notebooks.

It’s Only Blurry Because It’s Magnified The world’s smallest University of Michigan logo, magnified thousands of times.

Apple is justifiably proud of their so called "retina display", but a new display technology promises to make it look like about as sharp as a worn out 1977 Sylvania Superset.

This picture might look fuzzy, but that’s because it’s a super magnified image of an incredibly tiny area. About six of these University of Michigan logos would fit in the width of a single human hair. This makes the pixels about eight times smaller than the iPhone’s, and would allow for a full HD 1920 x 1080 display that was smaller than a postage stamp.

The technology is called a nanoresonator, and uses nano-thin sheets of metal with a precisely spaced grid of slits that can trap or release light depending on its wavelength. An added benefit is that no color filters are needed, making the nanoresonator display much more efficient than current LCDs.

The developers from the University of Michigan (no surprise) say the displays can be made to be flexible, and would be useful for projection displays in addition to very small high-rez applications.

No word on when nanoresonator displays might show up in actual products you can buy.

The 80-microns-thick (that’s 80 millionths of a meter, or about as thick as a human hair) full-color display can be rolled up and unfurled repeatedly without degrading picture quality. It was made possible by a breakthrough in OLED tech, in which Sony researchers created organic thin-film transistors with 8 times the performance of conventional OTFTs.

More details will emerge Thursday when Sony presents the technology to Society for Information Display’s 2010 symposium in Seattle. But suffice it to say, such technology points to a future where everything, even media usually associated with paper like newspapers and magazines, have the capacity to handle full color digital media. See it in action below.

The basis of most 3D systems is to "trick" our eyes into believing that an image shown on a flat screen has three dimensions, but what if you could throw away the screen entirely! It sounds simply too far-fetched and impossible to choreograph, but that’s exactly what researchers MIT’s SENSEable City Lab and Aerospace Robotics and Embedded Systems Laboratory (ARES Lab) have created with Flyfire – a cloud of LED-carrying micro-helicopters controlled in synchrony to show unique animated light displays in three-dimensional space.

Each "micro-helicopter" carries a small LED and is digitally-controlled and choreographed as a smart pixel that emits colored light. This is achieved using self-stabilizing and precise controlling technology developed by the ARES lab which allows the pixels to be controlled in real time. It has also been made possible by recent advances in battery technology and wireless control. The pixel is capable of displaying digital information such as 3D writing and pictures and rearranging itself several times in a performance before needing to recharge.

The Flyfire canvas can reorganize itself from one shape to another or bring a two-dimensional photographic image into a 3D form. "It’s like when Winnie the Pooh hits a beehive: a swarm of bees comes out and chases him while changing its configuration to resemble a beast," said E Roon Kang, research fellow at SENSEable City Lab. "Unlike traditional displays that can only be seen from the front, Flyfire becomes a three dimensional immersive display that can be experienced from all directions," said team member Carnaven Chiu.

Flyfire was developed as a public space installation, and although currently SENSEable are capable of controlling a limited numbers of helicopters they are aiming to further develop the technology to control very large numbers for more ambitious displays and applications. They also suggest it could be a step towards ‘smart dust’ technology, a wireless network of tiny synchronized devices the size of dust.

Based on capacitive technology, the “skin” is developed on a thinner-than-paper polymer film that turns a surface, be it glass, plastic or wood, curved or flat, into an interactive touch screen display.

The technology works by a grid of nanowires placed throughout the film recognizing touch screen interactivity. These input signals are then passed to a microprocessor controller that analyzes the data and determines the exact location where the contact took place.

The hypersensitive lightweight “skin” features air movement detection as well as touch sensitivity, so will, for what is thought to be the first time, react to a user blowing on it, registering both the intensity and direction of the air flow.

So far the “skin” has a size  dimension ranging from anywhere between seven inches and three full meters diagonally, and with a transparency rate of 98%, you can still see the surface underneath. At present a 50-inch display is able to detect up to sixteen fingers simultaneously.

While Displax initially began developing the multi-touch technology for use by manufacturers of LCD screens, the future potential uses are many and varied. Aside from audio visual integration through projection displays and enhanced gaming possibilities, the ability to cover bigger areas could see the technology used in a host of commercial environments, both in and outdoors.

Displax is expected to start shipping the multi-touch “skin” towards the middle of the year.

The glasses incorporate a camera on each lens that captures video at a resolution of 752×480 at 60fps offering a combined image of 1504×480 which can also be viewed in stereoscopic 3D. The cameras project real-world imagery onto LCD’s inside the glasses that give the effect of watching a 67” display from ten feet away. The images are overlaid with computer generated imagery effectively creating an augmented reality.

Aside from obvious uses like gaming, the Wrap 920AR has the potential to be harnessed for education, with books “coming alive” with overlaid information, or virtual city guides, whereby a user wearing the glasses can look down a street and see particular restaurants featured. Social networking could take on a whole new level also, with users able to find “air tags” left by friends when looking at a particular street scene.

Each camera has a 1/3 of an inch wide VGA image sensor and the unit also includes a 6 Degree-of-Freedom Tracker which allows for absolute accuracy of roll pitch and yaw. Vuzix is planning on a release some time in Q2 of 2010 priced at around US$800, with high resolution versions currently being used by the military also in the pipeline.