Reformulating displays [Tools & Toys]

The message from Display Week, June\´s annual gathering of the Society for Information Display, is that while the current big trend in the industry??smart televisions?? is driven by processors and software [see "Smart TV," IEEE Spectrum, July 2012], the momentum for the next wave of display products is coming from advances in materials. These advances will mean bigger screens and higher resolutions at lower cost and could even open the door to radically new devices, such as an information display that wraps around a cylindrical pillar.