New OLED Developed: Spin Polarized Organic LED (Spin OLED)

Demonstration of a conventional flexible OLED device

Light Emitting Diodes (LED) uses a standard semiconductor to generate light in different colors. Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLED) uses an organic polymer or plastic semiconductors to generate light.

They produce light on their own, do not generate heat, and are thin and flexible.

OLEDs are currently used as display units in small devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras, and MP3 players. Not to be confused with LCD screens, these type of dispaly screens do not need to be backlit with LEDs or lamps.

Some commercial visual displays also use OLED screens. Most of these screens use AMOLED (Active Matrix OLED) technology as they have a higher resolution than Passive Matrix OLEDs. An AMOLED screen has a thin-film transistor that switches each individual pixel on or off giving it better control and clarity of the image. Current manufacturing costs are what hinders this type of screen of breaking into the

University of Utah physicists invent 'spintronic' LED

University of Utah physicists invented a new "spintronic" organic light-emitting diode or OLED that promises to be brighter, cheaper and more environmentally friendly than the kinds of LEDs now used in television and computer displays, lighting, traffic lights and numerous electronic devices.

"It's a completely different technology," says Z. Valy Vardeny, University of Utah distinguished professor of physics and senior author of a study of the new OLEDs in the July 13, 2012 issue of the journal Science. "These new organic LEDs can be brighter than regular organic LEDs."

The Utah physicists made a prototype of the new kind of LED – known technically as a spin-polarized organic LED or spin OLED – that produces an orange color. But Vardeny expects it will be possible within two years to use the new technology to produce red and blue as well, and he eventually expects to make white spin OLEDs.

However, it could be five years before the new LEDs hit the market because right now, they operate at temperatures no warmer than about minus 28 degrees Fahrenheit, and must be improved so they can run at room temperature, Vardeny adds.

MIT News: 3D TV Without Glasses One Step Closer to Holograms

As striking as it is, the illusion of depth now routinely offered by 3-D movies is a paltry facsimile of a true three-dimensional visual experience. In the real world, as you move around an object, your perspective on it changes. But in a movie theater showing a 3-D movie, everyone in the audience has the same, fixed perspective — and has to wear cumbersome glasses, to boot.

Despite impressive recent advances, holographic television, which would present images that vary with varying perspectives, probably remains some distance in the future. But in a new paper featured as a research highlight at this summer’s Siggraph computer-graphics conference, the MIT Media Lab’s Camera Culture group offers a new approach to multiple-perspective, glasses-free 3-D that could prove much more practical in the short term.

Instead of the complex hardware required to produce holograms, the Media Lab system uses several layers of liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), the technology currently found in most flat-panel TVs. To produce a convincing 3-D illusion, the displays would need to refresh at a rate of about 360 times a second, or 360 hertz. Such displays may not be far off: LCD TVs that boast 240-hertz refresh rates have already appeared on the market, just a few years after 120-hertz TVs made their debut.

“Holography works, it’s beautiful, nothing can touch its quality,” says Douglas Lanman, a postdoc at the Media Lab and one of the new paper’s co-authors. “The problem, of course, is that holograms don’t move. To make them move, you need to create a hologram in real time, and to do that, you need … little tiny pixels, smaller than anything we can build at large volume at low cost. So the question is, what do we have now? We have LCDs. They’re incredibly mature, and they’re cheap.”

Layers of research

The Nintendo 3DS — a portable, glasses-free 3-D gaming device introduced last year — uses two layered LCD screens to produce the illusion of depth, with the bottom screen simply displaying alternating dark and light bands. Two slightly offset images, which represent the different perspectives of the viewer’s two eyes, are sliced up and interleaved on the top screen. The dark bands on the bottom screen block the light coming from the display’s backlight in such a way that each eye sees only the image intended for it.

Background TV Affects Cognitive And Reading Skills Of Children

The American Academy of Pediatrics discourages children before the age of 2 in watching television. The first two years is a critical time for development such as language acquisition. A child's brain triples in size during the first two years of life.

Aside from watching TV, even background TV may be detrimental to a child's mental development.

Background TV is a term used when the television is on without anyone actively watching. For children, background TV may mean that they are present near a television not watching the program being shown but doing something else.

Parents often watch a television show while a child plays nearby. Studies show that background TV affects the child as he or she plays with toys, even if they don't seem to be interested in the program. It reports that having the television on in the background can disrupt toddlers as they play with toys, causing them to lose focus during play which may lead to learning problems as they grow up.

American children exposed to high amounts of harmful background TV.

Children from the age of 8 months to 8 years are exposed to nearly 4 hours of background TV per day, according to a top paper to be presented at the International Communication Association's annual conference (Phoenix, AZ, May 24-28).

The study surveyed 1,454 English-speaking households with children between the ages of 8 months to 8-years-old. Younger children and African-American children were exposed to higher amounts of background TV. Models were included to explore whether demographic variables including child gender, ethnicity, race, age, and/or family income are associated with different levels of background TV. The report states that the rates are higher in minority households.

Previous research has shown that children with high exposure to background TV have been linked to poor performance in cognitive and reading tasks.