ColdFusion - Evolution of Display Technology [1940 - 2020]

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Starting point is 00:01:02 Xiaomi and Me Academy. Hi, welcome to another Cold Fusion video. In the last episode, we saw how Apple changed the consumer computing industry by using a desktop class arm chip in a laptop form factor, but also how Intel CEO made one of the biggest mistakes in tech history when he refused to make chips

Starting point is 00:01:20 for the iPhone. Today, we'll focus on another part of mobile technology, the screen. It's often taken for granted but a screen acts as an interface to our device. We read text, watch movies, view images, touch, swipe. But where did all of this come from and how did it all come to be? In this episode, we'll take a look at the history of display technology.

Starting point is 00:01:46 I'll also have a chat with Daniel D'Stalius, who was involved in the Xiaomi Me10 T-Pro phone. The phone that currently has one of the fastest refresh rate screens in the industry at 144 hertz. We'll discuss what it takes to design a mobile screen these days. Let's get into it. You are watching Tull Fusion TV. Do you remember those big and bulky monitors that were on every computer desk in the 80s and 90s, or maybe as the TV in your living room? These were called cathode ray tubes or CRTs,

Starting point is 00:02:22 and they're one of the earliest forms of electronic displays. Initially, they were used as oscilloscopes, before finding their way into TV applications and finally computer. The first commercially available cathode ray TV was produced in 1934 by the Telefunken Company in Germany. It cost around $8,000 in today's money. After World War II, TVs would hit the mainstream. The first commercial color CRT was produced in 1954 from RCA researchers. The reason they were so heavy and bulky was that they consisted of an electron gun.

Starting point is 00:02:59 The way it works is that these would fire electrons into an array of mass. millions of tiny blue, green and red phosphor-coated dots. The beam would fire horizontally row by row and when the tiny phosphor dots were hit by the beam, they would glow. When you do this rapidly enough, you can form the illusion of a moving image. Despite being inefficient, large and full of hazardous waste materials, CRT screens pretty much owned the 20th century as the display of choice. If you've ever looked at a calculator display or an old watch face from the 80s or so, you would have seen a low-power liquid crystal display, or LCD, at work. The way these function is actually pretty interesting.

Starting point is 00:03:43 They work on a principle called the twisted pneumatic effect. Basically, an electric field is used to align special liquid crystal molecules between two states. When the molecules are not aligned and twisted, it's an off-state. But when a low voltage is applied, they line up and form an on-pe. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery

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Starting point is 00:04:59 state. By manipulating this effect, you can form basic numbers and letters. The twisted nematic effect was first noticed by a French physicist, Charles Victor McGuin, in 1911. But it would be Wolfgang Helfrich, a physicist working for RCA in 1967, that had the idea to use this phenomena to make an electronic display. The RCA Corporation thought it was a dumb idea, so Wolfgang left and joined the Hoffman-LaRoche Lab in Switzerland. Together with some colleagues, he managed to build some working samples in 1970. Meanwhile, in America, a man by the name of James Ferguson was a liquid crystals expert who was also working on twisted pneumatic displays.

Starting point is 00:05:43 He was working at the Westinghouse Corporation. In his job, he had a contract with the LaRoche Swiss Lab who came to know of his work. Upon hearing the news of James' experiments, the Swiss lab scrambled to file a patent. Ferguson would rush out a similar patent two months later. This resulted in a three-year-long patent dispute that was eventually settled, resulting in millions of dollars in royalties from LCD screen use. In 1972, the first wristwatch featuring the technology was released. It was called the Gruen Telethime.

Starting point is 00:06:18 Unlike other displays which could require 40 volts or more to run, this method used hardly any power, and this made them perfect for portable devices like Pollyne. calculator or wristwatches and as you'll soon see modern LCDs. Most of you would know what an LED is. It's one of these. The basic principle is when a current passes through them they glow. As it turns out you can use tiny molecules based on carbon to achieve the same effect. This is called an organic light emitting diode or OLED. When you put millions of these together to form what are known as pixels you get a modern OLED screen. As does this,

Starting point is 00:07:00 As described earlier, LCD screens work by using the twisted pneumatic effect, and modern screens still use this technology but on a wider scale. And again, when you put millions of these together to form pixels, this is how we get our display technology. So here's a question. How do you control these things if you have millions of pixels on a screen? Well, as it turns out, there's a tiny transparent grid of wires with each pixel having three transistor switches. So why three? Because within each pixel, there's typically three sub-pixels, a red, green, and blue one. These tiny transistors control the level of brightness of each sub-pixel by using a tiny voltage. To represent a single colour, as per the instructions of a graphics driver, the transistor will vary the brightness of the green, red and blue sub-pixel separately.

Starting point is 00:07:52 Combine millions of these sub-pixels together, and you get an image. The fascinating thing is that the driver can only control. one row at a time. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales,

Starting point is 00:08:12 using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com

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Starting point is 00:09:23 OLED screens that use an Active Matrix are called Active Matrix OLEDs or Amelid. Both OLED and LCD were the two types of screens that would go on to dominate all consumer technology displays. So when you touch and navigate your phone, you can use two fingers to pinch and zoom or perform gestures. But it always wasn't this way. This technology is called capacitive multi-touch. The origins of multi-touch begin at CERN and a number of US and Canadian universities in the 1970s. CERN began using multi-touch screens as early as 1976. Multi-touch technology is capacitive as opposed to resistive,

Starting point is 00:10:05 which was a kind of touch technology that you had to use force in order to register a touch. Think ATM screens. Early PDAs like the Apple Newton or Windows mobile devices use this kind of technology, making them clunky to use. It was the main reason why most of the public was skeptical of touchscreen devices at the time of the iPhone's release. Capacitive touch, on the other hand, uses the human finger as an alarm. electrical conductor, which causes an electrostatic change in the screened surface.

Starting point is 00:10:37 This change can be measured and results in more accuracy than resistive methods. Between 1999 and 2005, the company, Fingerworks, developed multi-touch devices for those with wrist injuries and the disabled. One day in 2002, an Apple engineer who had broken her wrist brought one of the devices into the office to work. Other Apple engineers were fascinated and, Apple later ended up buying the Fingerworks Company. This key technology eventually became used in the iPhone in 2007. You can see the full episode of that story in my video, The Struggle of

Starting point is 00:11:13 the Original iPhone. And from here, we're all set for the modern day. There's other emerging technologies like mini LEDs, but we'll leave it here for today. Now that we've seen how we got to where we are today, let's look at the latest trend in mobile technology, high refresh rates. This basically updates the screen at more times per second, enabling smoother screen operation. The result is a device that feels faster and is more responsive. It's proved popular in the Android world and also on the iPad Pro, but the iPhone still hasn't adopted the technology. I'll bring in Daniel from Xiaomi to talk about it a bit more. For those of you not aware, Xiaomi is the third largest phone manufacturer in the world. We'll talk about some behind-the-scenes

Starting point is 00:11:59 aspect of This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most.

Starting point is 00:12:26 Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. At Volvo, safety is not a feature. It's our purpose. Rigorous crash testing. Decades of learning from real accidents. Innovations that help prevent accidents before they happen and help protect you when they occur. Going above and beyond industry standards. A vision of zero collisions. Volvo's legacy revolves around you because safety is about helping to keep you and everyone around you safe for life. Learn more at Volvocars.ca slash safety.

Starting point is 00:13:00 Smartphone screen technology using their latest phone at the Me10T Pro as a case study. My name is Daniel. I am the senior product marketing manager for Xiaomi Global. I was in charge of the Meatantee and Me10T Pro project. So when we made this display as one of our flagship, we decided that we wanted an industry leading refresh rate. We wanted to be really power efficient. We wanted to have industry leading color performance. And above all else, especially for me personally, but this is something that we worked on really hard for this. We wanted really, like a really healthy experience for the eyes.

Starting point is 00:13:36 So we set out with these four goals in mind. From there, we design the hardware that's going to enable this. And then from that, so we're building on pillars here. We're building on the user need. We're building on the hardware that will support it. And then we build the software that will support that, that will enable this and make the best use of content that you're going to be doing. In order to save battery life, Xiaomi has a technology called a digital. adaptive sync, which has seven stages from 30 Hz all the way up to 144 Hz.

Starting point is 00:14:04 So rather than forcing 144 Hz, no matter what you're looking at, let's say you're looking at a still image, 144 Hertz isn't doing anything for you there, but it's still consuming the same amount of battery life because you're refreshing more than twice the times per second compared to 60. By lowering the amount of times that the refresh rate, or the screen refreshes per second, you're lowering the battery consumption. Overall, for us, this has contributed to 8% more battery life. The phone actively analyzes what's being seen on the screen in order to choose the most optimum refresh rate.

Starting point is 00:14:35 So the hardware has absolutely no idea. And this is an issue that I believe other providers have been having. But the software is constantly taking a look at what you're watching. So if you're watching a video, it knows that it's 24, it's 25, it's 30 or it's 60 FPS. So it's analyzing that. It's analyzing what you're doing and deciding what reference. a trait to use intelligently. The company has actually built in-house software for evaluating if the phone is correct

Starting point is 00:15:03 in what refresh rate it chooses for various content. And I think this is a pretty solid idea. So it's checking both are we refreshing at the right rate and is the content being displayed at the right rate. Also, in my opinion, I'm not sure how many people would notice the difference between 144 hertz and 120 hertz, but I can see a slight difference when it's lowered to 90 hertz. And regular 60 hertz screens now just feel choppy. Another screen technology Daniel and I talked about was Reading Mode.

Starting point is 00:15:34 Reading Mode 3.0 is the latest iteration of a screen technology that intelligently adjust the screen's output to reduce eye strain and maximize eye protection. Eye health is actually like a pretty core concern. I think a lot of people, myself included, we spend six plus hours per day on a screen. One of the most dangerous things for our eyes, for like our natural rhythms and our sleeping schedules is blue light. So first, we added a 300. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows.

Starting point is 00:16:08 Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. At Volvo, safety is not a feature. It's our purpose. Rigorous crash testing. Decades of learning from real accidents. Innovations that help prevent accidents before they happen and help

Starting point is 00:16:42 protect you when they occur. Going above and beyond industry standards. A vision of zero collisions. Volvo's legacy revolves around you because safety is about helping to keep you and everyone. around you safe for life. Learn more at Volvocars.caps.caps. Safety. 160 degree light sensor. One of these is under the display and the other under the camera module. What this does is analyze ambient lighting and adjust to determine optimum brightness. So that your phone is blinding you will use scroll in dark conditions. Now finally, we optimize our reading mode to reduce blue light. This is done on the software end. And this even offers a paper reading mode, which is similar to the conditions that are

Starting point is 00:17:22 achieved by modern e-readers. No, I think it's definitely a possibility. Current technology has a few steps before it's going to get to this point. I think it really depends on which way you want to move with that, right? Do you want to take current E-ink displays and do you want to evolve them to have more capabilities? Or do you want to take our current displays, our current display technologies, and give them E-In capabilities? I personally favor the latter where we add more functionality to the devices that we carry all day anyways.

Starting point is 00:17:54 I don't know if you or your viewers are aware. Last year, we released a concept phone, our Mi-Mix Alpha. So Mi-Mix Alpha featured a folded screen, where the screen was folded around the entirety of the device. Now, this is slightly different than a folding screen, obviously, in utility, but this is more of a proof of concept and us exploring the boundaries of how we can actually adapt displays.

Starting point is 00:18:19 We do have a prototype that we have announced online of our folding screen device. It requires more engineering than simply the display. And personal feelings on this, I don't think current iterations that we've seen on the market are really up to snuff. It's cool and it may be an big element of the future, but when we do it, we want to do it 100%. We want it to be correct. So we'll do it essentially when we're ready.

Starting point is 00:18:46 It's amazing to see the progress of display technology over the better part of the last 100 years. We really do take it for granted, so I just wanted to highlight some of the milestones along the way. If you did enjoy this video and want to see anything more on science, technology, business, or history, consider subscribing to Cold Fusion. And also, a special thank you to Xiaomi for helping out with this video. So that's it from me. My name is DeGogo, and you've been watching Cold Fusion. And I'll see you again next week for the next episode.

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ColdFusion - Evolution of Display Technology [1940 - 2020]

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