The company has been working on a tech that will allow an 18 inch panel to be rolled into a 3cm tube.
LG, the electronics giant, has just confirmed the technology news that had only been rumors until now, that it has been working on the creation of panels that are paper thin and that can be rolled up into a tube as small as 3 cm (just over an inch).
The company has already unveiled a flexible OLED screen that is 18 inches with a 1,200 by 800 resolution.
According to the technology news release issued by LG, the OLED panel employs a “high molecular substance-based polyimide film.” This is a step away from plastic, which is the current standard. It also gave the ability to make the panels considerable thinner and provided a 30R curvature radius, so that it would be considerably easier to bend than the current materials that are standard.
The company also expanded on this technology news with another display, this time a transparent OLED.
The new LG transparent OLED display features a transmittance of 30 percent. The transmittance makes reference to the amount of light that can pass through a screen, with a current standard transmittance of around 10 percent on the TV displays that are currently on the market.
According to the senior vice president of LG, who is also the head of its research and development center, In-Byung Kang, “LG Display pioneered the OLED TV market and is now leading the next-generation applied OLED technology.”
He went on to state in the company’s technology news release, that LG Electronics is confident that within a span of 3 years from now, they will have completed the successful development of what he called an “an Ultra HD flexible and transparent OLED panel,” that will be greater than 60 inches and that will have a transmittance that is better than 40 percent. He also stated that the curvature radius of this device for the near future will be 100R. The outcome, according to In-Byung Kang, will be that this will help the company in “leading the future display market.”
This hiring only adds a larger amount of certainty that Apple is indeed pouring itself into wearable tech.
The latest technology news with regards to the iWatch is now crossing over with the announcement that Nike made earlier this year that it would be downsizing its Fuelband team as it changed its focus from having been on hardware toward software, instead.
This caused many to believe that the Fuelband would soon be finished, but it opened up an opportunity for Apple.
At the same time that nobody seems to know whether or not Nike will be moving ahead with its own wearable technology, Apple appears to be snatching up the former members of the Fuelband team and many are justifiably assuming that those individuals are being added to the experts working on the so called iWatch. The latest in hiring in this field has included two of the execs that had been a part of the efforts for the fitness band, and who are likely now placing their focus on the first smartwatch from the iPhone maker.
The two new members to the assumed iWatch team include Jon Gale and Ryan Bailey formerly of Nike Fuelband.
These two experts in mobile technology is only helping to add more fuel to the very powerful fire regarding rumors of a smartwatch that the industry believes will be released by Apple as early as October of this year. As is the policy of that electronics company, no official announcements or confirmations have been made regarding the device, as they never speak to any future developments until the official unveiling.
That said, the types of announcements that Apple has made, in combination with the patents that have been purchased and the type of hiring that they have done has made it so that there is little doubt left that some form of device in the wearables category is on its way.
Gale had been a Senior Firmware Engineer on the Nike team and has now been hired by Apple as a Sensing Systems Engineer. Bailey was at Nike as a Senior Test and Validation Engineer but is now a Mechanical Design Engineer at Apple. Both are presumably working on the iWatch.
