OLED display can be printed on any surface

Korean engineers have developed a new way to apply an OLED matrix to any surface of any shape.For

After the refinement of the technology, almost any objectcan become a carrier of a full-fledged color OLED display.

Complex forms

At Ense University, experts decided thatcreating displays of complex shape is not an advanced technology, and they raised the bar to a higher level. The new technology allows you to print on the substrate immediately all the key elements, and the electronics of the display, and the necessary supporting elements. Until now, the technique has required that three-dimensional printed figures (structures) be clearly tailored to the shape and size of the screen. Now you can create screens of any shape, without resorting to additional heat treatment.

Production process

To begin, the DLP system creates a framework fromtransparent plastic with a prepared place for the future display. Then the printer begins its work, which embeds the OLED matrix itself by applying a number of polymer layers to the substrates of microscopic nanowires (silver). The advantage of this method is the ability to print displays of arbitrary shape and then integrate them into surfaces of various transparency. This can be, for example, a special “snow globe”, a very popular souvenir that will cover a transparent OLED display. Also, this method will be useful for creating AR glasses, on the lenses of which you can apply a transparent layer of the OLED screen. And even finer work is the application of the screen directly to contact lenses in the future. The developers created several prototype examples: a bowl with a screen, a light bulb, and also a hand (brush).

Also in order to demonstratethe capabilities of the method, they collected real glasses of augmented reality, on the lenses of which screens are applied. Pairing with a smartphone via wireless. The potential for commercializing the technique is huge, printing speed can be significantly increased, scaling usually works, that is, the technology is working and ready to enter the consumer market. also along the way, new materials will be invented to increase the life of printed displays. If you reduce the oxygen permeability of the encapsulation material, then the durability of the screens will increase significantly.

Well, progress cannot be stopped, technologydevelop, the first pancakes that turned out to be lumpy (in the form of folding smartphones with flexible screens) will soon be forgotten, the future is most likely for wearable electronics. And if the method of applying OLED screens to any surface reaches an industrial scale, then the cost of augmented reality devices will become acceptable, and then fifth-generation mobile networks with their meager delay and high speeds will be very useful.