Flexible - Page 3

In August 2015 Polyera, a US-based OTFT backplane developer, announced their first product, the Wove Band flexible E Ink smart band, to be released in the second half of 2016. We wanted to learn more about Polyera's technology and business, and the company's Special Projects VP, Brendan Florez, was kind enough to answer a few questions we had.

Brendan has been with Polyera since 2008. Prior to joining Polyera, Brendan was an early employee at Rosetta, a digital marketing agency. Brendan holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University.

UK-based Plextek Consulting is developing E Ink based panels to cover drones with an aim to make them invisible. Plextek is using 8 inch by 10 inch E Ink panels that are monochrome and lightweight (probably flexible panels). The panels can change their pattern and design and by adding a camera can help camouflage the drone.

Plextek actually wanted to cover military vehicles, but this was too difficult and they switched to drones. Making military vehicles and aircraft invisible using flexible displays is an old idea - I remember the US military playing around with flexible OLEDs back in 1998 or so.

Looksee's announced the smart Eyecatcher E Ink Bracelet earlier this year, and now the company launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to fund this interesting device. The company's goal was to raise $75,000 and they quickly met the goal.

The Eyecatcher is a smart wearable device that has a large curved E Ink display (150 PPI) that can show custom images and phone notifications. The display is always on, and the device should last for months on a single charge - depending on the number of times you will change the display. If you update once every hour it will last for a year.

A few weeks ago Polyera unveiled their first product, the Wove Band - which is based on the company's OTFT flexible backplane technology. Now Polyera revealed the technical specification of this interesting device.

The Wove Band will use a touch E Ink display that is 30 x 156 mm in size with a 1040x200 resolution. Other features include a 1Ghz dual-core CPU, 4GB of storage, 512 MB of RAM and a 230 mAh battery. The Wove runs on Polyera's Wove OS which is based on Android 5.1.

Polyera unveiled their first product, the Wove Band. This smartband device is truly flexible and uses the company's OTFT (organic-TFT) technology flexible backplane technology and an E Ink display.

Polyera will start shipping samples in December to developers and artists, and the commercial launch is planned for mid-2016.

FlexEnable (recently spun-off from PlasticLogic) demonstrated their OTFT-based flexible displays, including E Ink, LCD and OLED display:

E Ink announced a new technology called Prism that uses new flexible E Ink materials to create animated walls/furniture that can respond to input. The idea is that a conference room door can change colors based on whether the room is occupied, or a wall can change color and be animated.

Those large-area (but still very power efficient) E Ink panels are probably very expensive, and currently E Ink will sell made-to-order installations for stores, lobbies, etc.

A month ago we reported about a new crowdfunding campaign by FES that aims to develop a smartwatch covered with E Ink panels. It turns out that Sony is behind this campaign - they created the fake FES company just to experiment with this idea and see whether it could become viral.

Sony did not confirm a release date for this watch. The campaign wasn't a great success, with 150 orders totaling 3.5 million yet (almost $30,000).

The FES Watch is a new crowdfunding campaign in Japan that aims to develop a smartwatch that is covered with E Ink panels - not only for the watch face but also for the straps. This allows you to reach a high degree of customization while keeping power consumption low.

According to the company's plan, the FES Watch will ship in May 2015.

Plastic Logic and Cambridge University recently demonstrated the world's first flexible display with a graphene backplane. This display is a 150 PPI E Ink panel:

Plastic Logic now aims to use a similar backplane to drive a full-color OLED.