Wearables Will Spur Next Big ‘Revolution’ in Displays, HP Guru Says

Fueling the boom in wearables is the fact that “things are becoming much more personal, much more embedded on the individual,” Wall said. “It’s becoming a land-grab for what body part you can get” among suppliers of wearable devices vying in an increasingly competitive market, he said. “This is really going to become the next wave, and this is going to revolutionize and put huge demand on the display and the touch industry. The changes that are going to happen, and the revolution that will need to take place to enable these changes, it’s all going to happen in the next one to three years."

Hand-in-hand with the coming revolution in wearables is the “radical change” that’s coming in “input mechanisms” from the very traditional keyboard toward new “gesture technologies,” Wall said. “The movement to gesture, I think, we're still at the very beginning of,” he said. Gesture technologies are “very novel and very interesting, and I would say still very primitive,” he said. “I think we're going to watch a revolution in that that will happen. We'll start seeing alternative ways you can use touch, you can use haptics, you can use different mechanisms to interact with those devices."

"Don’t be encumbered by the difficulties and problems” of creating next-gen displays for form factors that wearables will require, Wall urged display industry insiders in the audience. “Try to create something truly amazing.” Power management is the biggest challenge in designing displays for wearables, Wall said in Q-and-A. “As you look at displays you can put on there, it limits you because you only have so much power going on. And so you have to look at passive ways that’s going to happen."

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Corning is committed “to embracing a range of touch technologies, current and potential,” for notebook PCs, said Lu-Fong Chua, Corning’s product line manager for Gorilla Glass and specialty materials. The “most likely” outlook is that touch capability will be built into 20 percent of notebook PCs shipped worldwide by 2014, he said. The most “optimistic” forecast is for that penetration to reach 43 percent by next year, he said. Possible growth “inhibitors” for touch technologies include high costs, limited touch panel plant capacity and notebook PC reliability issues, he said. Possible market “drivers” will be an influx of better user interfaces than exist today as well as a “migration” of apps that will enable and enrich the touch experience, he said.

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High costs and implementation challenges are the two biggest hurdles blocking mass adoption of touch technology in notebook PCs, said Matt King, a senior engineering manager at Intel. Though King described himself as an early adopter customer for Apple products of all kinds, he had high hopes for last year’s introduction of touch capability on Windows 8 notebooks, he said. Unfortunately, the “first implementation wasn’t great,” though it has gotten better this year, he said. As for the near-term future for touch capability in notebook PCs, Intel predicts “huge demand” looming this year for dual-OS “2-in-one” notebook/tablet solutions with Windows and Android, and “it will be interesting to see how consumers respond,” he said.

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Swedish supplier FlatFrog plans to start volume production later this year of a consumer version of its in-glass optical touch technology for laptops, all-in-one PCs and monitors sized between 11 and 32 inches, said Chief Technology Officer Ola Wassvik. All-in-one PCs with 23-inch screens will be the first such application, he said. Since Q2 last year, FlatFrog has been marketing the technology for commercial applications, such as point-of-purchase displays, he said. The technology touts “excellent multi-touch performance,” including the capability to accept 10 or more simultaneous touches on a single screen, he said. “Pressure we think will be one of the great selling points of this technology,” he said.