Watch movies on a display as flexible as skin

Washington: An Indian-American researcher has created a new kind of full-colour display that’s a fraction of the width of a human hair and just as flexible. Debashis Chanda and his team who work at the University of Florida, made the new invention, latestnews360o said.

“All manmade displays such liquid crystal display (LCD) and light-emitting diode (LED) are rigid, brittle and bulky. But you look at an octopus. He can create colour on the skin itself covering a complex body contour and it is stretchable and flexible,” said professor Chanda.

The new technology will allow the users to change the colour of their dresses in the blink of an eye. “Your camouflage, your clothing, your fashion items – all of that could change,” he said. Professor Chanda claims his research was inspired from nature itself.

Traditional displays such as those on a mobile phone require a light source, filters and a glass plates.” Chanda said.

The expert added: “Animals like chameleons, octopuses and squids are born with thin, flexible, colour-changing displays don’t need a light source – because of their skin.”

“That was the motivation: Can we take some inspiration from biology and create a skin-like display?”, he mockingly said Modern day electronics such as televisions, computer screens and mobile devices which claim to have super thin displays are very bulky and thick when compared to what the researchers have used, which is only about few microns thick, compared to a 100-micron-thick human hair.

“The impact could be a new generation of displays that till now were never even thought of,” he said, adding: “This is a cheap way of making displays on a flexible substrate with full-colour generation.”