Wearables Will Spur Next Big ‘Revolution’ in Displays, HP Guru Says
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Wearable devices will mark the next great “revolution” in displays, and the upheaval is not that many years off, Shane Wall, chief strategy and technology officer in Hewlett-Packard’s Mobility Global Business Unit, told the DisplaySearch Emerging Display Technologies Conference in a keynote Tuesday. He estimates that 485 million wearable devices a year will ship globally by 2018.
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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.”